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Behind an anonymous-looking door on the fifth floor of the United States Secret Service headquarters, on H Street in Washington DC, is a small, windowless room known by the agents who work there as "the specimen vault". Lining the walls are dozens of filing cabinets filled with narrow steel drawers, containing scores of transparent plastic sleeves. In each sleeve is an individual note of US currency - a single, five, ten, 20, 50 or 100. The face value of the cash runs to millions of dollars. But the money in the drawers is worthless.

The specimen vault is the reference library of the Secret Service's counterfeit investigators. It holds an example of every fake US tender confiscated since the end of the 19th century. Most of the bills spent - or "passed", in the law-enforcement jargon - were created decades ago by skilled artists familiar with the fine engraving techniques and heavy machinery of the printing industry, career criminals who churned out thousands of dollars at a time.


But the advent of desktop publishing has changed the forger's profile, giving almost anyone with a copy of Photoshop and a scanner the means to print money. And if opportunistic bedroom forgers have made the crime more widespread, their operations are often small-scale and easy to detect; few ever produce more than $10,000.

But in January 2005, the Secret Service field office in Los Angeles discovered a fake $100 bill of remarkably high quality.

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Four years later in the specimen vault Kelley Harris, counterfeit specialist with the Criminal Investigative Division, hands me a Ziploc bag containing 14 bills which appear genuine. "Not bad," he concedes. Despite the best efforts of the Secret Service, the printer of these notes evaded capture for more than three years. By then Albert Edward Talton, of Lawndale, California, was responsible for putting more than $7 million in phony currency into circulation; he made much of it using kit bought at his local Staples office-supplies store. Albert Talton, 46, is charming and soft-spoken, a big, fastidious man with a taste for expensive cars and high-end audio equipment. Born and raised in southern California, he has been a criminal for most of his life. For ten years he was in and out of jail, and in 2001 he was convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to five years. Yet he also studied electrical engineering at California State University and is a man of considerable ingenuity. In 1987, when Bose was manufacturing a new type of speaker system, Talton wanted to know how it worked. "I was amazed," he says from the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California. "How could they get that much bass out of a speaker the size of a shoe box?" So he bought himself a Bose set-up for $2,500, went home, and took it apart. He figured out what the company's technicians had done and built his own version. This would not be his last experiment in reverse engineering.

In June 2004 he was released from prison, eventually finding work at a car-repair garage in Inglewood, California. A few months later his boss showed him a fake $50 note someone had passed to him. Talton examined it and thought: "I could do better than that."


There are few criminals pursued with more vigour than those who make their own money. Counterfeiting is considered such a threat to the fabric of the United States that, along with treason, it is one of only two criminal offences named in the Constitution. Although now better known for its role in presidential security, the Secret Service was actually founded by the Treasury in 1865 to combat currency counterfeiting.

Fake bills make up a tiny fraction of the cash in circulation at any time - the Service puts it at less than 0.1 per cent - but this still amounts to some $780 million in the US alone. And its impact can be significant: losses incurred by accepting counterfeit currency are not covered by insurance, and a run of fake bills will shake international confidence in the dollar. In the UK, where known fake notes made up approximately 0.03% of all sterling in circulation, £13.7 million worth of counterfeit notes were removed from circulation last year. The vast majority (98 per cent) were £20 notes.

Almost every physical attribute of the money in your wallet was conceived with the intention of making it hard to duplicate. UK notes are printed on paper made from a mixture of cotton fibre and linen rag; euro notes are printed on 100 per cent cotton; and US notes are printed on paper composed of 75 per cent cotton and 25 per cent linen, giving it a feel that's easily distinguished from the smooth wood-pulp paper commonly used in copiers.

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In 1996, US currency underwent a significant redesign, specifically to combat the growing use of colour copiers and computer scanners by counterfeiters as the technology became more sophisticated and widespread. The US Treasury has since introduced three further series of notes, each employing more complex security features: the most recent of which includes coloured backgrounds, intricate patterns of microprinting, water-marks, embedded security threads visible when the bill is held to the light and ink that appears to change colour, depending on the viewing angle.


Security features of UK notes are similar and include raised print (eg on the words "Bank of England"); watermarks; embedded metallic thread; holograms; and fluorescent ink visible only under UV lamps. There are three printing processes involved (offset litho, intaglio and letterpress) using a total of 85 specialised inks. Euro notes incorporate many of these features too, including watermarks, raised print, a metallic security strip, holograms, and colour-changing ink. But even the latest technology cannot thwart every forger. "The security features make it more difficult," says Special Agent Edwin Donovan, "but there's no such thing as

'uncounterfeitable'." --

When Talton set out to circumvent the US Treasury's security measures, he had no experience in counterfeiting, graphic design or printing, and he didn't even own a computer. His first attempts were made with a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one inkjet printer/scanner/fax/photocopier, which could be picked up at the time for less than $150. Early experiments, printed on regular paper, were fuzzy, so he cleaned up the original image on a computer. But there was a problem, Talton says: "It wouldn't take the mark." Counterfeit-detection pens mark yellow on genuine currency but brown or black on fake. Talton didn't know why. At first he thought the Treasury treated the paper, so he experimented with chemicals he found at the garage and even tried dipping his notes in fabric softener. Nothing worked. Frustrated, he began to take a detection pen everywhere he went, trying it on any paper he came across. He was about to give up when one day, in the toilet, he found himself staring at the roll of tissue. He took out the pen: the mark showed up yellow. Talton discovered that toilet paper, Bibles, dictionaries and newsprint are all made from the same recycled paper pulp, and all take the yellow mark. Newsprint is strong, and it has an additional advantage for the large-scale buyer: as Talton puts it, "Newsprint is real cheap."

Every investigation that the US Secret Service conducts into counterfeiting has the same goal, says agent Donovan: "To stop the bleeding." In order to staunch the flow of fake bills, US Treasury agents must arrest the people who are passing them, trace the transactions back up the chain of distribution, catch the printer and seize his equipment. "Plant suppression", as the service calls it, is a painstaking process: wise printers insulate themselves so those who spend the money have no idea of its source.

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Talton's counterfeit notes were first noticed early in 2005. All $100 bills, they were meticulously made. "It was key to his success," says Mack Jenkins, one of two US attorneys who prosecuted the case. "He didn't just make the easiest-to-produce counterfeit; he made the best he could." The simplest method of making counterfeit money is to scan both sides of a bill and print them on either side of a piece of paper. But in a real bill the security strip and watermark are embedded, so this kind of counterfeit is never convincing.

Talton realised he could solve the problem by using two sheets of tissue-thin newsprint: he printed imitation watermarks and security strips on the back of one, then glued the sheets together with the security features inside. Next he printed the front and back faces of the bills on either side of the sheets, which he hung from clothes-lines and coated with hairspray, creating a texture similar to that of genuine currency and a barrier that helped the paper take the mark of a counterfeit pen. Finally, he cut the notes to size. For all his scrupulousness, though, Talton used the same scan for every $100 bill he printed, so the alphanumeric codes to the left and right of the portrait of Benjamin Franklin never changed. These are the quadrant number and the face-plate number, which indicate which plate at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was used to make the bill: Talton's $100 came from plate no 38, spot H, quadrant no 2, and so was marked H2 and H38.

Albert Talton says he did not have any grand plan in mind when he started his operation. It was just an experiment "to see if I could do it", he tells me in a letter from prison, a few months after our initial conversation. Once he had made 20 or 30 bills, he gave them to an acquaintance - "a street person" - to see what he could do with them. The acquaintance sold them and returned for more. The H2/H38 notes appeared slowly in southern California, logged by Secret Service officers one or two at a time early in 2005. For the next year they followed a similar pattern: $100 here, $200 there, always around Los Angeles. But in 2006, the bills began to spread across the country in large quantities: $11,500 in January; $57,600 in March; $115,100 in September. In 2005 and 2006, a total of $1,300,200 in H2/H38 notes were retrieved. Secret Service agents questioned anyone caught passing the notes in any volume, but they always told the same story: they had no idea that the money was counterfeit and they certainly didn't know where it had come from. By early 2007, the stream of notes had become a flood - $347,700 in March alone. Jenkins would later calculate that by the end of 2008, at least $127,000 in H2/H38 notes had been spent in Macy's stores, and $19,000 in Jack in the Box fast-food joints. But the Secret Service still had no leads. --

In September 2007, Talton received a single order for $500,000 and began working day and night. He dedicated an upstairs room in his new house to a regimented counterfeiting process, with two Hewlett-Packard computers, nine inkjet and laserjet printers, stacks of paper divided by type; it was a manufacturing routine based on production-line principles: "Probably the best organised office I've ever seen," Mack Jenkins says. Once a week, Talton drove to Staples in nearby Hawthorne to replenish his supply of printer cartridges, drop his empties in the store's recycling bin, and use a Staples rewards card to accrue points in his own name. In the last three months of the year, Secret Service offices logged the passing of another $1,297,500 in counterfeit $100 bills bearing the H2/H38 mark. Agents were no closer to finding the person who was printing them than they had been two years before.

On January 14, 2008, at an H&M store in LA, a former employee bought $1,000 worth of clothes with $100 bills that all bore the H2/H38 mark. The following day two women returned with the purchase and asked for a refund. Under interrogation, the three suspects not only admitted that they knew the notes were counterfeit but also revealed who they had come from: Troy Stroud, who was put under surveillance.

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Two months later, Stroud was hawking Talton's latest product: a counterfeit $20. Because $20 bills are so easy to pass - few businesses check every one they receive - the investigation assumed a greater sense of urgency. Informants wearing wires met with Stroud and bought some of his H2/H38 bills; they also introduced him to two undercover Secret Service agents. The service got everything on tape and put a transponder (a receiver-transmitter tracking device) on Stroud's white Range Rover.

On April 10, Paul McCorry attended a meeting at which $2,500 in counterfeit hundreds was sold to another informant on the Secret Service payroll: he arrived in an orange Mercedes coupe bearing a licence plate that read "MCCORRY ". On April 15, three agents tailed Stroud to a Popeyes fried-chicken franchise in Inglewood.

While Stroud waited in the drive-through line, special agent Matthew Mayo entered the restaurant and watched him pay for his meal with a $20 bill. Naturally, it was a counterfeit.

On April 23, agents followed Stroud to the house in Lawndale.

The following day, they searched the bins outside, turning up fragments of counterfeit bills, printer cartridges, and a name:

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Albert Talton.

Early in the morning of May 8, Stroud was arrested. Talton's house in Lawndale was raided later that day when the Secret Service entered using a battering ram and shotguns. They found Goldberg at work in the kitchen; McCorry was in the bathroom; Talton himself was upstairs. On a computer screen was the image of a $100 bill.

The agents found $162,000 in finished notes, and almost $1.4 million in partially completed bills. "You can't get caught much more red-handed than that," Mack Jenkins says.

Between November 2008 and May 2009, Albert Talton and his three co-conspirators were convicted of "forging or selling counterfeit obligations of the United States". Talton was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison. The Secret Service put the total of all currency printed by Talton and successfully spent up to March 2009 at $6,798,900 - though ultimately both Talton and the authorities acknowledged that the sum was higher. "They agreed to keep it under the seven million mark," Talton says. "I had bills out there after that - and those weren't even just the hundreds."

By the time Talton was arrested, his money had been circulated in every state in the nation and in nine foreign countries. Of all the phony currency that was confiscated, four examples will be filed in the steel drawers of the specimen vault. The rest will be burned by the Secret Service - all but four further bills. In his office in the US courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Mack Jenkins explains that he and his fellow prosecutor, Mark Williams, are awaiting delivery of two sets of examples of Talton's best work - a $20 and a $100. These will be mounted and framed as souvenirs. "So we will have our own," Jenkins says. "It will be stamped


'counterfeit' on the back, but it will be up on our walls."

Williams smiles. "And if we ever want some Popeyes," he says, "we'll just crack the plaque open and go buy some chicken."

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