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When I was a kid, we could buy an ice cream cone
(double scoop) for five cents.
That was in the 50s. Now ice cream cones cost two bucks.
Are they worth that much?
To answer that question I will tell you two true
stories.
Ten years ago, my wife, Kate, and I were in Hong
Kong. We cashed a
check at an American Express office.
The teller gave us a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill.
Part of it had not even been printed on.
I raised the dickens and received a fully printed bill.
When I returned to Los Angeles, I called an FBI buddy
and he had a buddy of his from the Secret Service phone me.
The guy (Mike) said the Secret Service knew all about
the bad bills in Hong Kong.
He explained that a wily Thai in Bangkok owned a set of
near perfect printing plates.
Apparently he was churning out about 200 U.S. hundreds a
day.
One of the ways to detect counterfeit money is paper
quality. This Thai
bleached out single dollar bills and then printed on the real
paper. (I told you he was wily.)
The Secret Service has no jurisdiction in Thailand.
A few months later, a banker at a wedding, mentioned
that Citibank had a contract with the U.S. Mint. Each month, Citibank would gather up worn currency from the
Pacific Rim, burn it and replace it with new bills.
I asked the banker how much of the currency from the
Pacific Rim was funny money.
None, he told me.
“I’ve seen a phony hundred in Hong Kong.”
“We never look at money before we burn it,” he
said.
“You don’t?”
“No. We
weigh it. We can
come within 1/100th of one percent accuracy and when
you’re dealing with $60,000,000.00 every month, that’s the
easiest way to process the currency.”
Since then I’ve been considering counterfeiting as
a way to supplement my writing income.
I have come to the conclusion that using high-tech
color copiers, photo software, scanners and computers (the kind
you can buy for under a $1,000) it would be simple to create
undetectable copies of currency. (A bottle of bleach costs only
a few bucks.)
The way I figure it, the authorities can only detect
poor quality imitations. The
good imitations are so good, no one spots them.
I bet there’re billions of phony dollars whirling
around the planet.
I am certain I could make excellent 100s that would
pass undetected, especially outside of North America.
But I
wouldn’t try … because something could go wrong. A friend might turn me in after he heard me shooting off my
mouth on how I had pulled off the perfect caper.
People like to turn in criminals, especially ones who
shoot off their mouths – one of my many weaknesses.
Besides
the possibility of jail, there’s something else to consider.
How you feel about yourself.
If you become a criminal, you start to feel like a
criminal. While I
am far from perfect, I don’t want to feel like a criminal.
Criminals flood the market with bad but undetectable
money, thus diluting the total currency’s worth in the system.
Even if they don’t get caught they drive the price of
everything up – including ice cream cones.
What a monstrous thing to do to people, especially
kids who live for ice cream.
This brings us back to the present worth of a
two-dollar ice cream cone.
I happen to love them.
So if they cost two dollars, I say buy ‘em.
They’re worth it.
While you’re at it, buy one for someone you love.
In a few years because of the enormous amount of
undetected counterfeiting going on, the two-dollar ice cream
cone will be three bucks.
Still not a bad deal. After all, ice cream cones are one of the fun purchases you
can make almost whenever you want … as long as you’re not in
jail.
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