No document is safe any more. Counterfeiting, once the domain of skilled crooks who used expensive engraving and printing equipment, has gone mainstream since the price of desktop-publishing systems has dropped. Virtually any kind of paper can be forged, including cheques, banknotes, stock and bond certificates, passports and security cards. For currency alone, millions of dollars in counterfeit banknotes make their way into circulation each year, and 40% of the counterfeits seized this year were digitally produced, compared with 1% a decade ago. In ancient times, counterfeiting was a hanging offence. In Dante's "Inferno", forgers were placed in one of the lowest circles of hell. Today, desktop counterfeiters have little reason to worry about prison, at any rate, because the systems they use are ubiquitous and there is no means of tracing forged documents to the machine that produced them. This, however, may soon change thanks to technology developed by George Chiu, Jan Allebach and Edward Delp, three anti-counterfeiting engineers based at Purdue University in Indiana. The results of their research will be unveiled formally on November 5th at the International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in Salt Lake City.
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