Last updated: September 2026

What is the history of counterfeit money?

It is the history of paper money seen from the other side of the press. Every advance in note production, from block printing to intaglio engraving to polymer substrates, was answered by forgers, and every answer forced the issuer to add another feature. The record is unusually well documented because central banks kept score.

Three things make the story worth reading as a collector rather than as a true-crime enthusiast. First, the defences are visible on the notes themselves, so a security feature is a dated artifact. Second, the biggest episodes changed what real money looked like afterwards: British currency lost its high denominations for a generation because of one wartime forgery. Third, famous counterfeits are now collected in their own right, which makes authentication a live question rather than a historical one. Start with the history of paper money for the other half of the picture.

How did China punish counterfeiters when paper money began?

By printing the punishment on the money. Chinese paper money carried printed warnings against forgery as part of the design, so the deterrent travelled with every note and could not be separated from it. The clearest surviving statement of the policy is a Ming note in the British Museum.

The note is a 1 guan Great Ming Treasure Note of 1375, measuring 340 mm by 218 mm, from the reign of the Hongwu Emperor. Its face carries the name Da Ming tongxing baochao, a picture of a string of coins for the denomination, and a block of text that functions as a legal notice (British Museum, Chinese Ming banknote, on Google Arts and Culture).

Two details matter for collectors. The sheer size of these notes, the largest ever produced in China, was itself a defence, because a large woodblock-printed sheet with dense text and seals was expensive to imitate convincingly. And the reward structure recruited the public as inspectors, which is the same logic behind modern public education campaigns that teach people to feel, look and tilt a note.

Timeline of major counterfeiting episodes

The table below tracks the episodes that changed how money is made, with the method used and what followed each one. Every row carries a named source in the sections underneath.

How did Benjamin Franklin stop counterfeiters?

With materials science, decades before anyone called it that. A 2023 study analysed 600 pre-Federal American notes printed between 1709 and 1790 and found that Franklin's network used a distinct set of physical defences rather than relying on engraving alone.

The paper, "Multiscale analysis of Benjamin Franklin's innovations in American paper money", published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 17 July 2023, reports that Franklin used natural graphite pigments to print money and developed durable money paper with coloured fibres and translucent muscovite fillers, alongside his own nature-printed patterns and paper watermarks (PNAS, 2023). The notes analysed came from the Rare Books and Special Collections of the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame.

Nature printing is the trick most people have heard of. Between 1736 and 1739 Franklin introduced a method that used the impression of a real leaf, with its unique and intricate vein structure, to create an image that was nearly impossible for a counterfeiter to copy. The blue threads and coloured microfibres in the paper are the more quietly influential idea: the same style of coloured security fibre was later used in US dollar banknotes from 1862. If you want to see how those ideas evolved, read how banknotes are printed.

Why was the US Secret Service created?

To stop counterfeiting, not to protect presidents. The agency was established in 1865 as a bureau in the Treasury Department to suppress widespread counterfeiting, and protective duties came later.

The scale of the problem is the part that surprises people. In its own account of its origins, the Secret Service states that by the end of the Civil War, nearly one third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit (United States Secret Service). That is a plausible figure for a country whose paper money was issued by hundreds of separate banks in hundreds of designs, which made a convincing fake easy to pass simply because nobody could know every note by sight. Our pages on national bank notes and Confederate currency cover the money of that period.

The agency still owns the mission. It notes that the threat of counterfeit US currency continues to evolve, and that advances in technology, the availability of scanning and printing devices and the adoption of the US dollar by other nations as legal tender have made the problem a global one (US Secret Service, counterfeit investigations).

What was the Portuguese Bank Note Crisis of 1925?

The strangest case in the whole history, because the notes were not forged at all. They were genuine, printed by the Bank of Portugal's own printer, on the strength of a contract that turned out to be fraudulent. Artur Alves Reis presented Waterlow and Sons of London with documents purporting to authorise a new printing of an existing issue.

Waterlow and Sons printed 200,000 banknotes of 500 escudos with a total face value of 100 million escudos, a sum Paper Money Guaranty puts at 0.88 percent of Portugal's economic output at the time. Because the contract required the new notes to be identical to the existing issue, they carried duplicate serial numbers, which is how the scheme was eventually detected: two notes with the same number in two different hands. Reis chose to face the charges and defend himself, and his forged paperwork was good enough that some believed the central bank had devised the plot itself, which delayed the trial by five years. He was sentenced to 20 years (Paper Money Guaranty via CoinWeek).

The legal aftermath is the reason security printers still structure their contracts the way they do. Banco de Portugal sued Waterlow and Sons in London, and the case was decided in the House of Lords on 28 April 1932 in favour of Banco de Portugal, which was awarded £610,392 in damages. The judgment, reported as Banco de Portugal v Waterlow and Sons Ltd [1932] AC 452, remains a standard authority on how damages are measured when a printer delivers notes to the wrong party. A counterfeit note on display in the British Museum sits beside a genuine one carrying the identical serial number 1K 02201.

What was Operation Bernhard?

The largest counterfeiting operation ever documented, run by the SS at Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1942 to 1945 using imprisoned printers, engravers and bankers. It targeted Bank of England white notes, the large black-on-white notes then used for £5 and above.

Postwar figures cited by the Bank of England Museum put output at about 8.9 million notes with a total face value of £134,610,945 across the £5, £10, £20 and £50 denominations (Bank of England). The consequence for British money was permanent: the Bank withdrew every denomination above £5 from circulation and did not reintroduce a £10 note until 1964, a £20 until 1970 or a £50 until 1981. Surviving notes are collected today, often with water staining from the crates recovered from Lake Toplitz. The full story, including how specialists tell a Bernhard note from a genuine white note, is on our dedicated page about Operation Bernhard counterfeit pounds.

What is the supernote?

A family of unusually high-quality counterfeit US $100 notes, produced with intaglio printing rather than the offset or inkjet methods that account for most fakes. The name reflects the standard of workmanship, not the quantity produced.

A Congressional Research Service report titled "North Korean Counterfeiting of U.S. Currency" (report RL33324, last revised 12 June 2009) states that at least $45 million in such supernotes thought to be of North Korean origin have been detected in circulation, and cites estimates of $15 million to $25 million per year in earnings over several years from counterfeiting (Congressional Research Service, RL33324). The report is also candid that considerable scepticism existed about the technical capability required, which is a useful reminder that attribution in this field is contested.

The practical lesson for anyone handling notes is that quality alone is not proof of origin. A convincing intaglio feel cannot substitute for the checks that the issuing bank publishes, which is why our guide to spotting counterfeit banknotes works through features rather than impressions.

Which banknotes are hardest to counterfeit today?

The ones that combine a polymer substrate, a transparent window, a colour-shifting element and a tactile mark, because each defeats a different reproduction technique. Polymer in particular has moved the numbers, and the Bank of England's own statistics show how far.

The Bank reports that counterfeiting has substantially reduced since 2019, crediting polymer banknotes, the withdrawal of older paper designs, police action and the growth of electronic payments. In 2025, typically less than 0.0041 percent of Bank of England notes in circulation were counterfeit, which it puts at fewer than 1 in 24,390 notes, with approximately 200,000 counterfeits and a nominal face value of £4 million taken out of circulation against around 5 billion genuine notes worth roughly £90 billion (Bank of England, counterfeit banknotes).

The European Central Bank teaches the public a three-step check that works on any modern note: feel, look and tilt, applied to raised print, the watermark and security thread, and the features that change when the note moves (European Central Bank, security features). The same three verbs are the backbone of our own banknote security features reference.

What this means when you are buying

Collectors face a different threat from shoppers. The fakes aimed at the hobby are usually reproductions of scarce or famous notes, not attempts to pass at a till, and the Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar note is the most heavily copied modern example, which is why we maintain a real versus fake comparison for it and a separate page on replicas and novelty notes. For anything scarce or historically loaded, buy third-party certified material: graded versus raw banknotes explains the trade-off, and PMG versus PCGS covers the two main graders.

Planet Banknote is a family-owned dealership in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 2021. Every note is sourced direct from mints, central banks, and authorized distributors, inspected through our Planet Banknote Verified process, and ships with a free Certificate of Authenticity. US orders ship free via USPS Priority, and every order includes a free bonus gift.