KRIVOTVORENJE NOVCA KRALJEVSTVA/KRALJEVINE SRBA, HRVATA I SLOVENACA 1918. – 1929.
Authors:   Hrvatski institut za povijest, Geiger Vladimir 
Published: December 2022

Money is mostly counterfeited by individuals or groups who are motivated by the acquisition of illegal benefits. Despite the strict legal sanctions prescribed for counterfeiting and circulation of counterfeit money in all legislations, the occurrence of counterfeits is frequent. Counterfeit money, especially in larger quantities and more successfully executed, harms individuals, and citizens, who receive such money and is a significant danger to the national economy and monetary security. After the First World War, the counterfeiting of money as a special form of crime, sometimes politically motivated, gained considerable momentum, although the protection of banknotes against counterfeiting is more systematic. Individuals or groups often counterfeited the money of the Kingdom/Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1918-1941, often successfully, in larger or smaller amounts. Due to the ignorance and carelessness, especially of the rural population, counterfeiters managed to pass off large quantities of very good, but also poorly made counterfeit money. Different, more or less successful, counterfeits of Yugoslavian banknotes from 1918 to 1941, made in the country and abroad, are known. Monetary, criminal and numismatic literature and contemporary press record numerous and frequent forgery cases and forgeries, made by printing and drawing. Counterfeiting of money, especially banknotes, was frequent and numerous in the first decade of the new South Slavic state, the Kingdom of SHS. The counterfeiting of ’pre-unification’ banknotes (the Austro-Hungarian crown, that is, the ’Southern crown’ and the Serbian dinar) is an exemplary example of the counterfeiting of the Kingdom of SHS banknotes in 1918-1929, and the efforts of the authorities, primarily the National Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in preventing counterfeiting and detection of counterfeiters. In the Kingdom of SHS, the competent state institutions did not always manage to prevent counterfeiting and detect counterfeiters of banknotes promptly, or they adopted ineffective solutions. In the case of choosing the method and carrying out the nostrification of crown banknotes, even after the appearance of mass forgery of the nostrification of crown banknotes, both by stamping and marking, the Ministry of Finance did not demonstrate the necessary knowledge and ability. However, in preventing the spread of counterfeit banknotes and detecting counterfeiters, the efforts of the Department for Identification, that is, from December 1920, the Department of Technical Services in the Department of Public Security of the Ministry of the Interior, were noticeable. Due to the frequent and numerous forgeries of dinar-crown banknotes of the Ministry of Finance of the Kingdom of SHS at the National Bank, the Department for Technical Control of Banknotes was established in October 1920 (since 1929 it has been part of the Banknote Production Institute), headed by dr. Rudolph Archibald Reiss, who was an experienced criminalist played an important role in the reorganization and modernization of the technical police in the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of SHS. Significant and effective changes have taken place in the prevention of banknote counterfeiting and the detection of counterfeiters during the 1920s, which abounded in counterfeit dinar banknotes of the National Bank of the Kingdom of SHS. But the forgers of the banknotes of the Kingdom of SHS/Yugoslavia did not give up either.