Relatively cheap and high quality consumer scanners and printers have enabled the rise of the casual money counterfeiter. One who passes along home-made fake bills of low denomination in busy environments where the receiver is not likely to authenticate a bill. While this may be negligible on macro-economic scale, it does hurt consumers. In this paper we investigate several methods to identify counterfeit bills using an ordinary hand held mobile phone without any modification or special lighting. We demonstrate using a database of Swiss and Euro notes that variations of statistics along edges between a printing press, a laser and an inkjet are distinguishable with a mobile device. Furthermore, we show how random printing variations in the production of true banknotes can be used as a unique non-cloneable identifier for that particular bill.
Thomas Dewaele, Maurits Diephuis, Taras Holotyak, Sviatoslav Voloshynovskiy, "Forensic authentication of banknotes on mobile phones" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, 2016, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2016.8.MWSF-083