Counterfeit Money: From Clipped Coins to North Korean Superdollars

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Counterfeiting is often called the world's second oldest profession, and this episode traces it from Lydia around 600 BC, where plated fakes appeared almost as soon as coins did, to the security features in a modern wallet. Early forgers clipped the edges of coins or shook them in leather bags to collect gold dust. Rulers answered with savage penalties: decapitation in China, burning at the stake in Florence, and in 1690 England the execution of Thomas and Anne Rogers for clipping just 40 pieces of silver.

States soon learned to forge each other's money as a weapon. Frederick the Great flooded Poland with fake coins, the British pushed counterfeit Continental dollars during the American Revolution, and the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen to forge British notes in Operation Bernhard. The episode then follows the technological arms race that came after, from Benjamin Franklin's leaf prints to polymer notes, and explains why human politeness at the cash register still lets crude fakes through.

• Artist Jack Daws cast a 1970 penny in solid 18 karat gold, copper plated it, and spent it at the Los Angeles airport in 2007. It surfaced in a Brooklyn grocery store two and a half years later.
• In the 1860s roughly 5,400 kinds of legitimate bills circulated in the United States, and merchants checked them against weekly magazines called banknote reporters.
• In 1925, Alves dos Reis used forged contracts to trick the Bank of Portugal's own printer into producing real notes, injecting nearly 1 percent of the country's nominal GDP.
• Modern photocopiers shut down when they detect the EURion constellation, a pattern of five small circles printed on banknotes.
• Fake Australian notes with a window made of two pieces of taped plastic circulated in Melbourne and Canberra, and Chinese training money with bright pink characters passed in Darwin in 2017.