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The whiff of money

The whiff of money when Yoshihide Matsumura, the owner of a Tokyo-based small electronics firm fell victim to a credit-card fraud in Hongkong, he decided to hit back. But he did not take recourse to the law or even break it. Instead, using his expertise in fingerprint identification technology, he developed a high-grade counterfeit bill detector, which has been launched by his company, Matsumura, recently. His company, which has the capacity to produce about 500 units of this machine per month, already has orders for 45,000. With special sensor rays checking the notes, the machine can identify some of the most sophisticated counterfeit bills, he says.

Counterfeit dollar bills are judged on a scale of one to nine, with the crudest at level one. The fake bill detectors that existed before Matsumura invented his version could only pick out bills of around levels five or six.'Supernotes' or 'superdollars' - counterfeit us dollars - are ranked between seven and nine and have been almost impossible to detect. Matsumura says they do have flaws, though, and his machine can detect differences by referring to a histogram or statistical graph of patterns on real us dollar notes.

Each supernote tends to have two or three aberrations. Consequently, the sensors in this machine check for any variations on twelve points on the notes. A nine-second scan also examines the thickness of paper and printing ink.

Matsumura, unwilling to reveal the details of his machine in case competitors and counterfeiters exploit them, says that forgers tend to leave some sort of a mark on even the most sophisticated fake bills, so that they can be certain of not ending up with fake bills themselves. His machine checks for these tell-tale marks.

Interest in Matsumura's product has increased since the arrest of Yoshimi Tanaka, a former member of Japan's Red Army Faction, who fled to North Korea. He was apprehended at the Cambodian border last March and is believed to be involved in circulating high-quality counterfeit us dollar bills. It is estimated that a total us $380 billion in fake dollars is in circulation around the world. "The notes are easy to copy because the quality of originals tends to be quite low," Matsumura says.

Matsumura Electronics is selling the fake bill detector for us $1,762.5 through a distributing network covering 40 countries, and the demand is particularly high in Russia, the us, south-east Asia and the Middle East. "The forgery problem is very bad in Russia - one Matsumura machine detected 280 fake bills in a single day in one foreign exchange business in Moscow," he says.

Apart from accolades, Matsumura's invention has also brought him menacing telephone calls and threats from unknown individuals. He realises that his product poses a grave threat to various criminal counterfeits' outfits all over the world.

Production of a high-grade detector is a long term process because counterfeiters are constantly improvising the existing techniques and ways to create more sophisticated and undetectable fake bills. Matsumura has already obtained a level 10 counterfeit and believes that it will not be long before forgers begin churning out versions of the new dollar bills the us treasury has begun printing. "However, if my machine can stamp out the existing fake notes, that's still a lot of counterfeit money," he adds.

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