The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-01-29
THE COUNTERFEITER'S ART
GROWING SKILL SHOWN IN COPYING
 GOVERNMENT NOTES.

Dangers of the New Counterfeit One Hum dred Dollar Silver Certificate and Its Defects-Progress of Criminals in Mak- ing Spurious Bills-some Famous Forg- CTS and Their Work.
 Perhaps the greatest tribute ever paid to the counterfeiter's art In this country was the practical calling in of several days ago by the Treasury De- partment of the entire new issue of one hundred dollar silver certificates. It amounts to a confession on the part of the government that the counterfeiter has almost caught up with 1t, and that 1t is practically impossible to turn out bank note or silver certificate that cannot be copied well enough to insure to the commercials extensive circula- tion before detection.
 There is in this city what Is proba- bly, the best collection of counterfeit bank notes and certificates in the pos session of an individual in this coun- try. There were several good collec- tions up to 1891, but the government stepped in then and made 1t illegal for anybody to have counterfeit money in his possession without the permission of the Secretary of the Treasury This piece of legislation resulted in the | naCo ne aa1I The one left intact in this city belongs to John Holler and William Dickerman, who publish the United States Treasu- ry Counterfeit Detector, and it's owners have official permission from the Sec retary of the Treasury to maintain it. The complete collection of commercials represents nearly seventeen thousand dollars, but Messrs Holler and Dicker- man are allowed to keep only six hun dred and fifty dollars worth in their of- flee The rest is deposited in Washing ton, and includes duplicates of the sam pies in the collection in New York. The collection includes one of the new commercials
 The counterfeit is a splendid piece of work and even a careful examination by one not an expert will not bring out its defects. To detect it a man must be thoroughly familiar with the genuine bill The workmanship of the counter felt is almost perfect, and there is no crude engraving to catch the eye as in most commercials. It is impossible to estimate at the present time the num- Der of these bogus bills that have been passed, for they have been worked off in different parts of the country simul- taneously They appeared in Philadel- phia, Chicago and St. Louis at the same time, and little later began to come to light in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
 It would appear that they were ac- cepted without hesitation when pre- scented. No one raised the slightest question as to their genuineness until one of them fell into the hands of man who is supposed to know coun-
 terfeit without seeing it. When the Treasury employe whose touch or in- stinct warned him that he was handling a counterfeit looked at it, he was ready to make oath that for once in his life his skill had gone back on him. The wonderful workmanship, the qual- ity of the paper, and the threading, gave the bill an appearance of genuine
 ness that was startling
 A man who has made a study of
 commercials said to Sun reporter the
 other day that this latest one has a
 quality rarely possessed by bad mon
 ey. The more closely 1t is examined
 the better it looks. As a rule, counter feits cannot stand very close and care
 full examination from an expert, but the new silver certificate makes a better
 showing after it has been examined for
 a few moments than 1t does when it is , first looked at. It's general appearance
 Is almost perfect, thing hard to be- lieve after reading a list of the defects
 picked out by the Treasury officials and sent broadcast in the land as a warn ing to bankers, merchants and others.
 Once an expert, wish his knowledge of all the thousand and one little points
 about the genuine bill, becomes satis-
 fled that a bill is counterfeit, he can
 speedily pick out for the informa ton of
 
 flaws by which the counterfeit can be
 distinguished from the genuine. Hence t l the long list of defects which has been : sent out as warning against the new 5 counterfeit.
 5 It may be well to state at the very
 outset that the Treasury expert who
 prepared the list of flaws made one se-
 rious mistake. He says in the printed
 warning that the "t' in Washington , is not crossed The 't' is crossed, al-
 though in some of the commercials the line Is very faint and scarcely discern ible without a glass. On the other hand, others of the commercials show . no signs of this flaw at all and the "t'' are as we'll crossed as those in the original bill. For the purposes of
 comparison the bill from which the warning sent out was prepared was studied alongside of several other coun [ terfeits of the same issue, among them : the one now in MT. Hollers possession {, They were found to be exactly similar 1 | in good points as well as bad points e excepting in the matter of the "t" No [ cross could be seen in the government 5 bill with the naked eye. An ordinary magnifying glass failed to reveal one - but under a powerful glass the line showed up distinctly It is a safe as- , l sI1mption after thiS to sov fb,t +J,a sst,