Currency, the economic lifeblood of a country. It has witnessed the rise and fall of a country, and also recorded the historical situation of a nation.
However, money is also an extremely brutal form of economic warfare. Once attacked by malicious counterfeit money, a country's economy can collapse in a very short period of time.
Historically,There have been powerful countries that have used this tactic to inflict heavy damage on their competitors. Today, countries are still trying to guard against this hidden danger.
Currency is not only a witness to the fortunes of the country, but also a blade of economic warfare. It connects the past, the present and the future, and embodies the destiny of a nation.
Stumbling on the road to counterfeiting
During World War II, Germany launched a large-scale counterfeiting of the British pound in order to combat Britain. The plan, known as the Bernhard Plan, was initiated by the Nazi Nauyoks and approved by Hitler.
In order to complete this plan, Germany gathered a group of engravers, paper experts, mathematicians and other technical personnelWork together on how to counterfeit the pound.
The role of mathematicians is to crack the anti-counterfeiting code of the pound. After months of hard work, the first counterfeit pounds were finally born.
In order to verify the quality of the counterfeit pound, Germany sent a small number of counterfeit banknotes to Switzerland for exchange. The Swiss bank did not see through it and successfully exchanged 90,000 francs. The quality of this batch of counterfeit pounds is clearly passable, and everything is going well.
However, just as the plan was at a critical stage, Heydrich, who supported the plan, suddenly turned against him and attacked Nauyox on fabricated charges, resulting in Nauyox's exile and the plan to forge the pound sterling was forced to be suspended.
In the short process of counterfeiting, Germany only had time to produce more than 400,000 pounds of counterfeit banknotes. Although it has had a certain impact on the British economy, it is far from the expected effect.
The originally good situation was thus frustrated because of internal contradictions. History is full of surprises and uncertainties, and Germany's counterfeiting path is no exception, which ultimately ended in failure.
Among them, the process of making counterfeit banknotes by the Germans is quite tortuous. In order to keep it secret, they deployed the counterfeiting work in an abandoned factory deep in the mountains and old forests.
Workers work overtime day and night in extremely harsh conditions. It took months just to crack the British pound security code, which shows how difficult it is.
The paper material and printing process have also been tried and improved to perfect the effect of counterfeit banknotes.
Nauyox himself poured his heart and soul into this project. He raised funds from various sources and personally supervised the work of the technicians.
To boost morale,He even visited the factory late at night to spend difficult sentry hours with the staff. It was his efforts that made this seemingly crazy plan possible.
The causes of the infighting were dramatic. Heydrich wanted to make a name for himself through a fake scheme, but found that all the glory of success went to Nauyoks.
Jealous, he designed to frame his henchmen. The power struggle put an end to the Germans' dream of counterfeiting, and it also made a good story in the history of the British pound's anti-counterfeiting.
Fraudulent plan: Germany has planned an economic war against Britain for many years.
Beginning in the 1930s, Germany staged an economic war against Britain. In order to crack down on Britain, Nazi Germany's top brass made full use of Jewish technical talent to secretly falsify currency to weaken Britain's economy.
The first is Heinrich. He led the first counterfeiting team, whose main members were Jews in Sweden. These Jews themselves possessed great engraving skills and knew how to make high-quality paper.
Heinrich gathered them at an undisclosed base in Berlin to work overtime, and the workers worked under close supervision every day.
After half a year, Heinrich and his team finally succeeded in creating a large number of fake pounds. These counterfeit banknotes are so realistic that they can be circulated and used without being detected.
The money was approved by Hitler, and Heinrich was promotedSent on a mission to the front of the Eastern Front. Hitler approved the quiet injection of the counterfeit banknotes into the British economy for all kinds of investment activities.
Over the past few years, the British economy has indeed suffered a certain shock, and the inflation problem has become increasingly serious.
However, this clandestine fraud operation did not last long, as in 1943, Heinrich was killed by the Allies in the Czech Republic while on a mission. Since then, the first counterfeiting teams have completely collapsed, and the project has been aborted.
Soon after, Himmler appointed a young man, Bernhard, to continue the program. Bernhard had previously worked in the Nazi forgery department, specializing in making fake passports and other documents.
He decided to continue using Jewish experts in the camps to make money, and at his selection, 134 skilled Jews were taken away and gathered to work overtime in a converted mint in a compound outside Berlin.
These Jews were imprisoned day and night, and their lives were extremely hard. I can only eat some malnourished potato and grass soup for three meals, and my sleep time is also very short.
German soldiers kept an eye on them, and the slightest laziness would result in a beating. These Jewish experts were divided into several teams, each performing their own duties to complete the design, printing, quality control and other links, and strictly carried out the work.
Over the course of three years, they were manufactured in two districts in Sachsenhausen and produced up to 600,000 counterfeit banknotes per month, far more than the real Bank of England.
Bernhard also jokingly refers to his team as the "Bank of England" and has set up a large warehouse next to it to store finished products.
These counterfeit banknotes are mainly of low denomination and are not easy to arouse suspicion from the British side. Germany used them to buy black-market supplies and conduct espionage in order to weaken the British economy.
Despite the extremely secret manufacturing process, the existence of these "high**" counterfeit banknotes was gradually discovered by the British ** after many years.
Because the Jewish experts hated the Nazis in their hearts, they deliberately left some flaws in the details of the banknotes.
This covert economic war, which lasted for more than a decade, saved Germany money for a while, but it was eventually discovered and became part of the Nazi defeat.
Japan produced large quantities of counterfeit fiat currency during World War II to hit the Chinese economy
During the Anti-Japanese War, Japan secretly made fake fiat currency worth up to 4 billion yuan, and its purpose was very clearIt is to seriously damage China's monetary credit by releasing a large number of these counterfeit coins, which will lead to the collapse of China's economy.
However, this conspiracy ended in failure, and Japan's "economic war" can be said to be completely useless.
At that time, China was in an environment of internal and external troubles, and the situation of people's livelihood was widespread. And it is precisely because of this that Japan will choose to attack China by making counterfeit money.
They believe that in the hands of the vast number of poor people in China, it does not matter whether they can recognize real and fake banknotes, but what matters is that they can fill their stomachs with money in their hands.
Japan intends to unleash some counterfeit banknotes in rural areas in a low-key manner, gradually cultivating a distrust of fiat currency.
Subsequently, a large number of counterfeit banknotes were released into the cities through various channels, causing inflation to worsen rapidly, triggering social unrest and economic collapse.
But Japan apparently did not expect that the inflation they deliberately created already existed in China. In order to support military spending, China** had to print money like crazy, leading to hyperinflation.
In the eyes of the common people, fiat currency has long been worthless, and the market has basically stopped using currency transactions. Prices are skyrocketing, and people have to barter to make ends meet.
A large number of counterfeit money released in Japan,Not only did it not disrupt the economic order, but it became the first of inflation, making the already worthless fiat currency even more worthless.
Japan's attempt to hit China's economy by creating counterfeit currency this time can be described as a complete failure and useless effort. They invested a lot of time, manpower and material resources, but they did not achieve the desired results.
This has undoubtedly taught Japan a painful lesson, and it has also shown us that in an environment with a fragile economic foundation, it is impossible to achieve the goal of striking at the enemy's economy by simply destroying the currency.
Stealing dollars could not continue its "counterfeiting business".
In recent years, there have been a lot of incidents of fake dollars around the world. In 2009, Peruvian banks were found to have more than $5 million in counterfeit money, causing international concern.
Behind the incident is a counterfeiting syndicate, and the United States dispatched intelligence services to locate counterfeiting dens in Colombia.
After two years of encirclement and suppression, the organization was finally wiped out, and their instruments and masters were successfully confiscatedso that it can no longer be faked.
The CIA used the same methods used to hunt down bin Laden and closely monitored the counterfeiting rings.
They found the specific location of the crime, and then sent a ** team to raid it. In the exchange of fire, the US side obtained information on the activities of the other side, thus completely eradicating this criminal organization that threatens the US dollar.
At the same time, Brasa, a master counterfeiter in Canada, is also printing fake dollars. It took him just a few months to crack the dollar anti-counterfeiting system and about 2200 million US dollars, and was finally captured by the United States and Canada.
Born into a single-parent family, Brasa was expelled from school as a child. When he grew up, he founded a drug trafficking company, but later left for health reasons to travel the world, eventually choosing a business as a lifelong career in counterfeiting.
Extremely criminal-minded, Brassa used a unique chemical method to imitate the paper of the US dollar banknoteMake a product that is indistinguishable from the real thing. He also hired a group of professional printers and set up a counterfeiting workshop.
Over the years, Brasa managed to evade the pursuit of the United States and Canada** until a warehouse accident caused an informant to confess his hiding place.