Every business man should know how to detect altered bank bills, and a close scrutiny of all money offered, bearing in mind the suggestions here made, will prove a safeguard.  Bank notes are sometimes altered by raising from lower to higher denominations, or replacing name of broken bank by name of good one.  This is done either by erasing words and printing others in their place, or by pasting on the original bill a piece of counterfeit work or a piece taken from some genuine bill.  If the former, the new counterfeit piece will always differ from the surrounding genuine work.  If the latter, the fraud will be revealed by holding the bill up to the light, when the portion pasted will look darker than the surrounding portions.

Another method employed is to cut ten-dollar bills in halves, also five-dollar bills, then join them, and raise the five part to a ten by the blue paper dodge.  This bill can be successfully worked off in a roll of other bills, owing to the workmanship, and sometimes a gang will visit a certain locality and flood it with doctored bills.  Fifty-dollar bills have been often raised from a ten.  This fraud is generally neatly executed, and is well calculated to deceive the unsuspecting, and a banker, in hurriedly counting money, is liable to be taken in on one of these.

A recent scheme to defraud with raised bills is to raise a two-dollar bill to a five.  In order to accomplish this feat rascals cut out the figure five in the left-hand corner of a “V” and paste it over the figure “2” in the upper right-hand corner of the two-dollar bill.  The pasting is done so neatly that not one person in a hundred, or even a thousand, unless an expert, would notice the difference.  The very small $2 marks in the scroll-work surrounding the large figure are blotted out with a pencil and are not visible.  The figure “2” in the lower right-hand corner is erased with acids, and the bill is in all respects a first-class imitation of the genuine article.  Treasury officials say that this is something new in the way of bill-raising, and is very dangerous.

Many people who are not used to handling money have been swindled by what is known as “Imitation Money.”  The United States Treasury Department is making strenuous efforts to break up the practice of issuing imitations of the national currency, to which many commercial colleges and business firms are addicted.  This bogus currency has been extensively used by sharpers all over the country to swindle ignorant people and its manufacture is in violation of law.

So vague is the general idea as to how a bank note is made that we give an explanation of the various processes it goes through before it is issued as a part of the “money of the realm,” saying, by way of introduction, that this country leads the world in bank-note engraving.  Unfortunately, the first consideration in making a bank-note is to prevent bad men from making a counterfeit of it, and therefore all the notes of a certain denomination or value must be exact duplicates of each other.  If they were engraved by hand this would not be the case; and, another thing, hand engraving is more easily counterfeited than the work done by the processes we herewith describe.