Never ever do this, esp in the US, even as a joke. I know of cases in my college where students counterfeited $20 bills as a drunk joke: what they found out is that irrespective of the amount federal agents and the goddam CIA got involved and they got persecuted to the maximum degree. My prof was called as an expert witness in the case.
I read an article about it a long time ago. The minimum penalties are draconian. An example from the 80s was a kid who had been making photocopies of $1 bills and feeding them into a change machine for free candy. The minimum penalty at the time was something like $100,000. Today they are higher. You don't want to mess with them.
Governments take money seriously. For example everyone knows that Isaac Newton was a great scientist. Few know that he became Master of the Mint, and was responsible for enforcing the traditional penalty for undermining the currency - execution by drawing and quartering. (By all accounts he was very zealous in this task.)
That's part of every grammar school boys education. Or was, in my day. Newton sending a couple of dozen men off to Tyburn to be hanged, drawn and quartered was quite memorable.
I live in the United States and grew up in Canada. It certainly is not in the curriculum here, and has been a surprise to everyone I've mentioned it to around here.
If you grew up somewhere else, it may be common knowledge there.
That's because world history in America is much the same as the world series - fully encompassing of the whole world, with countries as far afield as.... Canada :)
I should have mentioned I grew up and went to school in England, and learning the ins and outs of luminaries like Sir Issac Newton was part of history class.
To be fair, we only touched on American history, and obviously seen from the other side of the coin. We kicked out the religious pilgrims so we could get back to partying and starting the industrial revolution.
Actually the USA is more insular than that. Almost nobody here knows even basic historical facts about its neighbors such as, "The only reason that Canada exists is to not be part of the USA."
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Confederation#Influenc... and look at the #1 external cause. That doesn't say much about the history, but does confirm that fear of US invasion was important to Canada's formation. Sure, a lot more internal reasons are given, but that external one was by far the most important and drove the timeline.
Here is more background on that. The official policy of the USA was that it was their manifest destiny to expand/conquer/control a variously defined part of the world that always included Canada. In the 1840s the USA launched a fairly unprovoked war on Mexico and annexed half the country. Coming out of that war, the USA negotiated a treaty where they took a large chunk of British territory in the great plains. Then the USA fought the bloodiest war in history to that point. (The US Civil War.) Coming out of that war the USA was hostile to Canada with the Secretary of Defense making comments indicating that Canada was next. And the Fenian raids (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids for more) were being launched from US territory against Canadian targets.
2 years and a week after the ending of the Civil War, the act of Confederation created Canada as a single country. 3 years and 11 months after that, Canada had achieved approximately its current borders. (The USA did manage to take the Alaskan panhandle from BS, Newfoundland didn't join Confederation until after WW 2, but the country was recognizable.) And the #1 goal of the new country was to build a railroad across its southern border so that troops could be moved to meet any possible US invasion.
For more historical background, the original separation of Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) was to accommodate refugees from the newly created USA who wished to remain British subjects. In the USA they are called "traitors". In Canada they are still called "loyalists".
And to this day Canada has no real national identity other than, "We're not Americans."
So there. Thank you for proving how little Americans know about Canada, and hopefully you learned something. If you have any follow-up questions I would suggest doing a Google search and reading appropriate Wikipedia articles first.
I heard stories from an American student who went to my Canadian university...
Apparently he was back home partying it up with some of his home town friends... when the Secret Service kicked down the door in the middle of a party, immediately subdued his friend (the counterfeiter), and left abruptly.
The previous comment is probably misremembering; the U.S. Secret Service is responsible for investigating counterfeiting, which seems pretty odd if you're only familiar with them as personal security for presidents.
That is pretty interesting that the Secret Service deals with more than protecting VIPs. I googled a bit, a turns out they were originally created by Lincoln as a division of the Treasury to combat counterfeiting.
