Posted on 01/12/2008 7:02:14 AM PST by Non-Sequitur
It wouldn't surprise me if they know by now, based on which version of their notes have been showing up in North Korean hands.
I vaguely remember reading that the early color copy machines had a device that didn’t allow combinations of certain colors.
“Of course it that is the case then McClatchy newspapers have just torpedoed it.”
Yes, they were quite prolific in the details given about ID’ing the bills.
VVVVVVery Prolific.
We all do. Wash the image off a $1 bill, and reprint it with a $100 image...
Chemical in pen reacts to wood fibers and changes colors.
Slicks sides of receipt paper is treated.
NK would not need to print bills. Iran could print them and use them to buy nukes from NK.
If it's hooked to your computer, and your computer is ever subsequently hooked to the Internet, it will slip a note to the bug man.
Also that printer doesn't ever print a perfect copy. All modern printers add an overlay pattern of discrete one pixel sized yellow dots. Since they are small, low contrast, and sparse the unaided eye doesn't notice them. The pattern encodes the make and model of the copier/printer, and its serial number.
I sort of have the opinion that the US Govt. has been printing counterfeit money since 1934. Now they are PO’d because somebody is competing with them.
Do any Freepers remember the Russian security agent accompanying Putin to Kennebunkport who attempted to use a fake $100 at the liquor store?
KEWL! Thanks!
According to the article, these superbill countefits have the newest security devices incorporated into the paper: The watermark portrait and the UV flourescing security strip.
Those have to be put into the paper during manufacture, so any 1950's era paper stock would not have them.
The quality of actual North Korean currency? Remember that that country doesn’t have anything worth buying, even for its severely repressed subjects, not even food. And it’s the ultimate police state, so no one would dare counterfeit North Korea’s own worthless currency. North Korea also has a 100% tax on everything and generally doesn’t permit any sort of banking or other economic activity outside the government. You don’t need a sophisticated currency when it can’t buy any products or services.
They gave it to the Shaw, too?! I thought they only gave it to the Shah.
To which I also say pshaw, pshaw!
Why would they need to? They make more than $50 million a day from the oil they pump.
Using information found in this CNN report , links are made between North Korea and Macau.
The Macau based Banco Delta Asia stands accused by the U.S. of laundering counterfeit $100 bills made in North Korea. The bills, called "Super-notes" are high quality counterfeits and are almost impossible to detect. At the heart of the scheme is the Zokwang Trading Company of Macau, it is staffed by North Koreans with diplomatic passports. Several of these Zokwang officials were arrested in the mid 1990s by Macau police on suspicion of passing the fake bills, some of which were traced to Banco Delta Asia. The accused North Koreans used their status as diplomats to leave Macau without ever going on trial. But the U.S. government is convinced the counterfeiting continued. Macau authorities took control of the bank and froze dozens of accounts linked to North Korea worth more than $20 million.
This is where things get hard to follow, but some familiar names pop up in the following report. Names link Ng Lap Seng, Ya-Lin (Charlie) Trie, Chen Kai-kit, and the Clintons.
Some copy and paste highlights:
Investigators began to look into Trie's bank records and tax returns, to discover that he recieved almost no income other than remittances from a little-known businessman in Macau called Ng Lap Seng. Born in China, Ng's diverse business interests included ownership of one of Macau's hotels in the territory, the Fortuna, whose night club featured "table dancing" by strippers, a massage parlour and a karaoke room with "attractive and attentive hoostesses from China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma together with exotic girls from Europe and Russia." Many of them as young as 12 years old.
Other shady players in the Donorgate saga soon emerged, all of them contacts of Trie’s in Macau. Chen Kai-kit, who also used the name Chio Ho-cheung, was a prominent Macau politician, who owed his 1996 election victory to the 14K Triad, whose goons intimidated voters or bought their votes for US$195 each.35Obviously, Chen was no ordinary businessman. He was actually not a native of Macau, but a Hainanese born in Thailand. But his influence in Macau was based not only on his political muscle in the Legislative Assembly; he was also president of the local association of people of Hainanese descent — and the proud owner of a local “no hands” restaurant, where waitresses feed the customers to enable them to use their own hands to explore the bodies of the young ladies while gulping down the Chinese delicacies which are put in their mouths. His wife, Elsie Chan, had in 1986 been a runner-up winner of the Miss Peace prize of the Miss Asia beauty contest. She later made a mark in the local television and film industry by introducing more full-bodied women on the screen. In married life, she continued supplying Macau’s various “entertainment” centres with women from her husband’s native Thailand. Chen, Elsie and Trie sat at the head-table with Clinton at a fund-raising dinner at Washington’s Sheraton Hotel on 13 May 1996.
Ng and Chen may not have had any personal interest in seeing Clinton re-elected, but in exchange for acting as conduits for money from the mainland they would get unofficial protection from the Chinese military for their own shady businesses. But to agree to help infiltrate the White House was pushing it, even for people with high-level PLA contacts.
Ng was one of the most mysterious of the characters in the “Donorgate” saga. He was not born in Macau but in China, and arrived in the territory in 1979 with a few belongings and the equivalent of US$12 in his pocket. He began his business career selling bales of cheap cloth to the local garment industry, and later became one of the most influential businessmen in the territory. But after all the damaging revelations that came out of the “Donorgate” affair, the enigmatic Ng disappeared from sight in Macau.
Chen Kai-kit, the Triad-connected legislator who had dined with the Clintons, published an autobiography in which boasted that many international figures had paid him tribute, including the American president, who presented him with “a signed photograph,” which he hung on the wall of the office of his “import-export” company, called Ang Du, in the Bank of China building in downtown Macau. Such displays may have benefitted Chen in his attempts to build up a network of business associates in the territory, and perhaps also in China. But there was one man on whom it was not necessary to make any special impression: Wong Sing-wa. They were already long-timefriends and close partners in the management of a VIP room in Macau’s Mandarin Hotel. Wong, the head of the Talented Dragon investment firm, was in 1990 appointed Pyongyang’s honourary consul in Macau, and the travel arm of his company was authorised to issue visas for North Korea. As such, he worked closely with Zokwang Trading, North Korea’s main commercial arm in Macau. In early 1998, a Lisbon-based weekly newspaper, the Independent, protested Wong’s presence in a delegation from Macau that was being received by the Portuguese president. The paper cited a Macau official as saying that Wong had “no criminal record, but we have registered information that links him to organised crime and gambling in Macau.” Wong was also linked to the inner circle of people who had tried to buy their way into the corridors of power in Washington. In 1995, he posed for a photograph outside the White House with Stanley Ho, another local business contact, and two sisters: Anna Chennault and Loretta Fung.
Chen Kai-kit also resurfaced soon after Donorgate. He landed in the middle of another controversy in early 1998, when it was reported that Ukraine would sell an unfinished aircraft carrier to a “leisure company” in the then still Portuguese territory. Ukraine had inherited the aircraft carrier after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and badly needed hard currency. The registered objective of the Macau company, Agencía Turistica e Diversões Chong Lot Limitada — which in English means “Tourism and Amusement Agency” — was to run “activities in the hotel and similar areas, tourism and amusement.” But why would such a company need an aircraft carrier? And where would this obscure company get US$20 million, which was the price that Ukraine wanted for the 67,000-tonne vessel?
More links between North Korea, Macau and Zokwang Trading Company go back as far as 1994. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/HA18Dg01.html 1994? That's Clinton era. Was Clinton's 1996 re-election funded by money he knew wasn't even real?
The Zokwang Trading Co was considered Pyongyang's de facto consulate in Macau, and the relationship between Zokwang and Banco Delta Asia is no secret. As far back as 1994 the bank found thousands of bogus US$100 bills allegedly deposited by a North Korean employee. The director of the Zokwang Trading Co was held and questioned, but no charges were pressed.
I’ll keep you posted as to whether the Secret Service comes knocking on the door to talk to my wife.
:)
Please do. *eyeing my cheap H-P all-in-one printer...*
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