Counterfeit money
money that was created illegally
Counterfeit money is currency produced outside the legal sanction of a government, usually in a deliberate attempt to imitate currency and to deceive its recipient. Counterfeit money is a form of fraud or forgery, and is illegal across the world. The business of counterfeiting money is one of the oldest forms of fraud: plated copies (known as Fourrées) have been found of Lydian coins, which are thought to be among the first Western coins.
With the introduction of paper money, counterfeiting as a whole has also changed. While early forms of money were more vulnerable to replication, now with modern tools counterfeiters have evolved into using things such as high-resolution scanners. Today, some of the most realistic counterfeit banknotes are called Superdollars because of their high quality and imitation of the real US dollar. There has been significant counterfeiting of Euro banknotes and coins since the launch of the currency in 2002, but considerably less than that of the US dollar.
Counterfeiting has numerous effects including reduction in the value of legitimate money; an increase in prices (inflation) as a result of an increase in money being circulated in the economy—an unauthorized artificial increase in the money supply; a decrease in the acceptability of paper money; and losses, when traders are not reimbursed for counterfeit money detected by banks, even if it is confiscated. Banks and law enforcement across the globe work to prevent and detect counterfeit currency, while also helping to educate the general public on how to identify fakes.
History
Counterfeiting has occurred so frequently in history that it has been called "the world's second-oldest profession".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Counterfeit money” as money that was created illegally. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as money that was created illegally. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q854851. The Library of Congress control number is sh85033440. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Counterfeit money” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.