" Dud " Banknotes !

The electronic age has enabled our printed banknotes to contain a number of important safety features to deter counterfeiting, but that same technology also enables the bandits to produce fakes that look and feel like the right thing.  Counterfeit gangs usually try and pass their trade in the high volume shopping malls of Melbourne and Sydney.

The most favoured denominations are the fifty and the hundred dollar notes.  Usually fakes are detected when they pass through the hands of an experienced bank teller, where they are confiscated and handed to the police.   Under the present law, the Reserve bank does not compensate a business that finds a counterfeit note when counting the days takings.

Industry estimates that a business needs to sell another $ 2,200 worth of goods to recoup the profit loss sustained through a single fake hundred dollar banknote.  The statistician tells us that on average there are about fifteen fakes in circulation for every million dollars of genuine currency in the system.  That equates to about 24,000 dud bills in circulation across Australia each year.

Of course that relies on business customers doing the right thing and handing in fakes and suffering the loss. Passing on a dud fifty in giving someone change is fairly easy, but hundred dollar bills pose a very big problem for most types of business.  We know that some business owners go to great lengths to recoup their loss.

People who advertise personal goods for sale need to be wary if those goods do not need any form of official verification.   For instance, selling a car requires the exchange of registration papers and these identify the past owner.  A canny business owner stuck with a dud banknote is more likely to want to buy a television set or jewellery which can be recycled without suspicion.

We are fast reaching the stage when any business transaction that involves the exchange of banknotes needs to be treated with caution.  That is becoming so unusual that it creates suspicion and the money offered is usually now inspected closely.  It is very hard to duplicate the " feel " of a genuine banknote and the safety features built in to the note surface are either indistinct - or missing.

The nation's currency is a constant tussle to make counterfeiting harder, and we are soon to release a new twenty dollar bill.  All our currency receive regular upgrades and we may soon see some shops that refuse to accept cash money.  The tap of a phone or a card is just so much faster than counting out change and the cash takings are no longer acceptable at many bank branches.   Money needs to be collected by a security service, counted and delivered to a central bank - and that comes at a cost to the merchant involved.

A few centuries ago when " money " was gold or silver coins, it was the custom to bite each gold coin to determine if the centre was a lead substitute.  We are fast reaching the stage where high denomination banknotes are treated with similar suspicion.