but I'm confused.

The copier techs who 'Rich' was replacing, called out a copier tech to clear a paper jam?

Moar coffee needed.

It would explain why they thought photocopying $20 bills on to, in all probability, cheap copier paper and then colouring them in with felt-tip pens was absolutely going to go unnoticed and totally a good idea!

This level of stupidity deserves jail time.

What were they thinking?

That there is a sort of "privilege of confession" or "solicitor-client privilege" for copier tech-people?

It boggles the mind.

I'm guessing they should received the Darwin award, but they're still living...

Well they were stopped from reproducing just not in the biological way

You really couldn't make it up. Too good to be true!

Oh, hang on. It's not possible that "Rich" made the whole thing up?

...it's almost brilliant

I am talking back in the late 80s/early 90s - the copier vendor known by the mis-spelled medieval device of ordnance had firmware in their colour machines (the crap logo copier 0.5x10^3) which wrote "Specimen" across anything it recognised as currency of certain denominations.

I am surprised that all copier manufacturers didn't have something similar - but then the tale in the article might refer to an even more dim and distant past.

Source - know the guy who wrote that bit of the firmware (at lkeast for the UK market).

I used to fix Sharp photocopiers (among other things) in the early 90's. I was told by Sharp that their copiers and flat bed scanners had currency recognition and that they'd bork and lock up if anyone tried.

Never had the courage to test it.

Currency detection in copiers is a thing and has been for a while. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Years ago when we had new shiny multi function copiers in our office we tried to copy a banknote, just to see how good the copy would be. It wouldn't do it and threw up a specific "currency detected" message. The only way we got it to work in the end was to cover the metal strip with a thin strip of post-it note, so that machine was obviously detecting the metal strip optically somehow.

The copy that came out obviously had a blank strip over where the metal strip should be so it was obviously not genuine. But the quality was surprisingly good. We reckoned that if done on the right paper rather than crisp hard copier paper and roughed up a bit, it might pass. This was in the UK when banknotes still had a paper feel to them, rather than the plastic of today. If course we never actually did it, we shoved the copies in the shredder and went back to the lab but I can easily understand how some people would be tempted.

We found this feature when we decided to photoshop a picture of the bosses face onto some £10 notes - he had a habit (on being told the price of some bit of laboratory equipment, computing equipment or chemical, genuinely,) of pushing his ears forward whilst exclaiming "How Much???!!!", then rubbing the bald spot on his head vigorously saying "I'll have to think about that one. Can you come up with a cheaper alternative?" So we had the bright idea of giving him his own currency. Needless to say the scanning head got about 1/3 of the way along the note before grinding to a halt with disgusting noise like someone was torturing a stepper motor and throwing an error which required a cold power cycle of the scanner itself to reset. We eventually found a note which referred us to some Federal Bill in the USA that required such a feature to be added to scanners and copiers.

Originally copiers were optical & analog - not the modern scanner/printer arrangement. Getting such a machine to add "specimen" to some copy types would have been quite the trick...

I believe that there is some software that prevents copying currency these days. I seem to remember the conversation when new high quality copiers came to the premises, and a colleague with extensive experience in printing mentioned that copying currency gets a watermark...

In the UK at least, when you photocopy money you see the invisible watermark on it. Can't remember right what it says tbh.

What's funny though is that even with this, some doughnuts still try it on. I worked in a bar in about 2008 and on a Sunday morning some bloke came to order a pint. Handed me a £20 note - and the moment I felt it I knew it was off. The dope had thought he'd be clever and photocopied a £20 note, without removing the watermark, printed on to two bits of paper glued together.

I told him that's a fake, and he needed to provide real money. He protested it was real money, I took the pint off him and said we're passing it to the Police so if he's adamant it's real he needs to take it up with them. He didn't hang around.

Not just copiers, but scanners, too. My simple Canon does-nothing-but-scanning scanner reports an "unknown error" when its innards detect what it thinks is currency.

See here for the watermark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

It's based on the printer's serial number. If you print anything that the government does not like, they can track you down by manufacturer (which store it was delivered to) and purchase records (what credit card it was purchased with).

I was called out to a machinery control room located near an ornamental lake on a swanky new housing estate. Vandals had broken in and damaged the controls which turned out to be superficial. Anyway, the police, acting on information received, tried to catch these neer-do-wells and did a stake-out a few nights later. On re-entering the premises the youths kicked-in the door, knocking unconscious the policeman behind the door and they then proceeded to set all the machinery running before running away.

The now-drained lake revealed stolen/dumped cars, motor bikes, cycles as well as the usual shopping trolleys etc. and a pong of decaying fish.....

(The policeman recovered his health quickly but not his dignity.)

I remember reading that colour laser copiers have code in the firmware that recognizes bank notes and distorts the image so that it doesn't print properly. Modern printers also encode the machine serial number forensically into everything they print. I suspect there is probably hacked firmware available with those features removed. It wouldn't be too hard to do.

When I was at university, the student union bar discovered that on one very busy evening they had accepted about 150 quid of counterfeit notes. It was dark, with disco lighting and smoke, but the notes weren't even remotely convincing. They were just photocopied, in black and white on regular paper, printed on one side only. Sounded like an inside job to me, but they never found the culprit.

I heard a "technical team" from the Bank of England would tour the "photo copier and printer" trade shows with "test sheets" to see how good they were and if the copies were good enough - they changed the bank notes to make it even harder.

Back in the late 80's, the company my father then worked for made what were basically large scale high quality fax machines, used to send newspaper and magazine pages around the world for local printing, rather than printing everything centrally and shipping tons of paper. Since magazine images are printed using half-toning, scanning these with a digital scanner produces interference patterns, known as moire. I spent one summer working on a mathematical model that would predict the patterns based on the known half-tone dot spacing and angle, and the scanning resolution, to allow scanning at resolutions that minimised the interference, but another guy was working on ways to break up the pattern so that it effectively became unnoticable. Once that was patented the BoE guys came calling, as those same interference patterns were generated when scanning the variable spacing curved lines on a bank note, and were a copying defence mechanism. "That won't work" they said. Oh yes it did.

I don't know if this applies to the new polymer notes, but a favourite trick of mine to see if the money was real or not was to rub a bit of a till receipt on to the money. If ink came off on the receipt then it was real.

Fake money doesn't do that, only real money.

When I worked in a finance office from 2010, we took payments by cheque, postal order, or in cash about 2 to 4 times a week. The process was to photocopy all paperwork, including the remittance item, file the copies in polywallets in a ring binder, notify the relevant other office by email that payment had been received, and bank the payment down the road at the local Barclays branch. If the payment was in cash, one person had to count the notes in front of a witness, then photocopy all the notes front and back (quicker and more accurate than writing all the serial numbers down. Sometimes £1,000 in £20s. The copies were so good on the big contract rented supplied Xerox MFD/copier that we used to stamp 'COPY' over each note's image. The paper would have been a giveaway you'd think. The firmware didn't complain that we were copying currency. We stopped taking cash in person (or at all) in 2015.

Not counterfeiting, but one job I had I was an emergency temporary cover for the head cover who'd just been fired in a march-out-of-the-building-we'll-clear-your-desk type of way. My main task was to reproduce and document all the IT procedures that were stored in his head without him being involved in any way. I'm not sure what he'd been fired for, but part of the new procedures documentation was a rigourous asset movement process, so my suspicion was "asset leakage".

I saw my first fake of the newer plastic banknotes a few weeks ago, a £20 one. It felt rough to the touch, unlike the slippery feeling real ones, and it also had a very unconvincing hologram. It would probably pass muster in a busy, darkened bar or club. In this case, it had been tendered as payment for a coffee in my friend's cafe - the staff realised it was fake, and the smartly dressed lady who had proffered it immediately did a runner.