The Crime of Looking Just Like the Real Thing — Counterfeit Money and Imitation Goods

Last time, we traced the lineage of the ‘confidence trick’ — winning trust first, then exploiting it. The deceiver struck at the unseen vital point of the human heart. But ‘deception’ does not stay only in the realm of the heart. In time, it spills out into the world of objects you can hold in your hand. Fakes made to resemble the real thing — counterfeit coins, counterfeit brands, works copied without permission. What we trace this time is the endless contest over real and fake. It is also a record of a long game of chase, in which, the very moment something of value was born, a fake was sure to be born as its shadow.

As the Shadow of Money — The Long History of Counterfeit Bills

The history of counterfeit money is said to be almost exactly as old as the history of money itself. A coin or a bill of guaranteed value is itself a ‘crystal of trust.’ Precisely because everyone believes in its value, a small piece of metal or a single sheet of paper can be exchanged for food or land. And precisely for that reason, those who would steal that trust have always appeared.

In ancient Rome, it is thought that forgery was carried out by coating only the surface of a coin with silver and packing cheap metal inside. Against this, the issuing side did not sit on its hands either. Around the 1st century BC, the device of cutting jagged notches into the edge of the denarius silver coin is said to have appeared. The mechanism was such that shaving the edge would expose the different metal inside — an earliest anti-counterfeiting measure, presumed to be meant for seeing through a fake at a glance. The contest of wits between those who make the real and those who make the fake had already begun more than two thousand years ago.

In the age of paper money, the struggle grows fiercer still. Refined printing techniques, special paper, watermarks, intricate patterns — all of these are devices to make forgery difficult. And the forging side tries to overcome each one. The battle of real and fake over currency even has an ironic side: it has pushed forward the very technologies of printing and papermaking.

When the State Becomes the Forger — Operation Bernhard

Currency forgery may call to mind criminals of the underworld. Yet in history, the one that carried out forgery on the largest scale was the state itself. It was ‘Operation Bernhard,’ executed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The aim of this operation lay not so much in its own profit as in the destruction of the enemy nation. By forging British pound notes en masse and scattering them, it sought to throw the British economy into chaos from within, it is said. If fake bills flooded the market, people would stop trusting the pound, and prices and finance would be thrown into disorder — a cold conception that tried to make trust in the currency itself into a weapon. The forged pounds produced ran to an enormous number of sheets, their total face value said to have reached a scale extraordinary for the time.

This operation holds another fact that must not be forgotten. It is reported that the work of forging the bills mobilized Jewish technicians held in concentration camps. People with high skills in printing and platemaking were made to forge an enemy nation’s currency in exchange for a guarantee of their lives. Behind the fake bills, said to have been so refined as to be indistinguishable from the real, lay the harsh circumstances of such people. The act of forgery, as a tool of war, drew in even human dignity — Operation Bernhard shows one of the darkest places that fake-making has reached.

Stealing the Proof of the Real — Counterfeit Brands and Pirated Goods

As the ages went on and an affluent consumer society arrived, fakes took on a new form. Not fake money, but fake ‘value.’ Counterfeit branded goods that steal the names, marks, and designs of famous brands. Pirated copies of music, video, and software reproduced without the rights holder’s permission. These are called ‘copy goods’ or ‘illicit goods,’ and are targets of enforcement around the world.

What the fake steals here is not metal or paper but the invisible ‘trust’ and ‘fruits of creation.’ Into a certain brand’s logo is folded trust in quality, built up over long years. Into a single book or a single song are poured the time and talent of its maker. Counterfeit brands and pirated goods ride for free on that accumulation, snatching away the reward that should originally have reached the maker. In Japan too, counterfeit branded goods are regulated under trademark law, and pirated copies under copyright law, in their manufacture and sale.

What the Endless Contest Reflects — Trust as the Foundation

From counterfeit money to counterfeit brands to pirated goods, what runs through the history of real and fake is one simple fact: a fake is born precisely because the real has value. What no one wants is not bothered to be forged. The existence of a fake is, ironically, the flip side of there being, right there, a value worth protecting.

And this contest has no end. When a new anti-counterfeiting technology is born, someone appears to break it, and the next countermeasure is devised again. From the notches of ancient Rome’s silver coins, to today’s watermarks and special printing, to the authentication technologies of the digital age, humanity has endlessly continued this game of chase. What matters is that the root of this contest is, always, ‘trust.’ That money can be trusted, that a brand can be trusted, that the origin of a work can be trusted — to protect that premise, society keeps paying enormous effort and cost.

The history of fakes leaves us with a quiet question. What is it that makes the real real? It is not the material or the appearance, but the ‘accumulation of trust’ that lies behind it. Next time, we move on to one of history’s largest investment frauds, which cunningly turned that very trust into a fake. Gathering the confidence of people around the world over many years, while its substance was hollow — it is the story of the Madoff affair.