Counterfeit bills have been battled for years by increasingly sophisticated technology and techniques – one of the most recent being a new polymer-based bill that Canada is introducing.
The Bank of Canada’s website displays the new $100 and $50 bills that will incorporate the new feature — the remaining bills won’t be released until 2013.
“[It’s] a material that allows us the incorporate a lot of security [into the currency],” said Julie Girard, a Bank of Canada representative.
And Canada will be taking security to new frontiers, with the addition of the holography technique.
“Within [the large transparent window], there is what we call complex holography . . . that’s actually a world first,” Girard said. “No one else has such a large transparent window.”
The transparent window in the bill contains two metallic images: a portrait and a building.
“If you tilt the note, you’ll see that both of those metallic elements react differently . . . It’s two different types of technology, and that makes it a lot more difficult to counterfeit,” Girard said.
The new polymer bills will cost 19 cents to make, and the old cotton-based ones only cost 10 cents, according to Girard. But the new polymer bills are said to last two-and-a-half times longer, so Girard said she believes they’ll actually be saving money.
These new technologies are being used to address the problems of counterfeit notes in Canada. In 2000, Canada had 104,563 bogus bills either passed off or seized, according to the RCMP’s website.
By 2004, the prevalence of counterfeit bills had risen by 487 per cent. According to the the RCMP’s website, 552,980 bills were passed off, with a face value of $12.9 million, and another 95,324 bills, totalling $2.79 million, were seized by police.
The Bank of Canada doesn’t exchange fake bills, because they feel this would only encourage counterfeiting, according to their website.
“[In 2004 for] every 1 million bills, we had 470 counterfeit bills,” Girard said.
In 2006, after Canada introduced its Canadian Journey Series, which incorporated new security features, counterfeiting started to decline.
“In 2010, the figure was 35 [counterfeit notes] per million [notes] . . . It has gone down more than 10 times, but we want to make sure that continues,” Girard said.
New technology is still being developed to make it harder for people to counterfeit notes. One such technology is nano-optics — something that Doug Blakeway, the CEO of NanoTech Security Corp., is advocating.
Bills using nanotechnology would use a series of nano-holes which would allow for certain wavelengths of light to be trapped and amplified, creating a shifting, colourful image, Blakeway said.
But nanotechnology doesn’t just paint a pretty picture. It will also allow currency makers to place “back data,” information about where and when the bill was produced, into their physical makeup of the currency, Blakeway said.
Canada’s counterfeiting problem may be down to 35 fakes per million notes, but that’s not enough, Girard said.
“[Even] one bill is one too many.”
