The first thing Fabio tells me is that, of course, the excellence of the finished product depends on a combination of skill and costs, as with any manufacturing enterprise, and the first spending decision a counterfeiter has to make concerns paper. Its makers made a critical cost-cutting decision, he says. Kirk Semple is a freelance writer based in Bogota. It's a significant cost-saving measure, since a 10 bolivar note is worth about 1.5 cents. The shoddiest bills Fabio has come across had a top price in Colombia of only a few bucks and probably never even left the country.
Colombian criminals are world specialists in assassination, cocaine and falsification.
Bolanos, who has been hunting counterfeiters in Colombia for two decades, attributes this in part to the country's weak laws. The maximum penalty for a conviction is six years in prison, but under the Colombian penal code, any sentence up to six years can be exchanged for a cash fine. A recent change in the criminal code, which goes into effect next year, will make counterfeiting a crime eligible for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, closer to the 15-year maximum in the United States. While the law-enforcement community is optimistic that the change will hinder the counterfeiting industry, Fabio isn't convinced. You can lose a lot of paper at the start.