2. 职称英语
  3. The Supernote Kelly was stunned when the bills were presented to him. Two

The Supernote Kelly was stunned when the bills were presented to him. Two

游客2023-12-28  15
问题    The Supernote
   Kelly was stunned when the bills were presented to him. Two of them did not appear to be fraudulent. "I’ve done counterfeiting cases, and I know what a counterfeit bill looks like," he says. "These bills looked genuine. They felt genuine. I said, ’If these are counterfeit, this is a serious problem for the United States. ’ " Kelly immediately called the Boston office of the United States Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury. " I said, ’ We have some outstanding-looking bills, and they came from Lebanon,’ " he recalls. "Secret Service was at our door in three and a half minutes. They knew exactly what I was talking about."
   Kelly, it turned out, had obtained samples of a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill that had been dubbed the Supernote. It had surfaced around 1990 and originated in the Middle East, and, the agents told Kelly, as far as they could determine between two and three billion dollars’ worth had been printed in two years. It was indeed no ordinary counterfeit. Most fake currency is printed on an offset press— the type used for books and magazines — and it tends to look and feel flat. The Supernote, however, was being manufactured by the same industrial process used to make authentic United States currency, known as intaglio printing, in which an etched plate meets paper with tremendous force, giving the note a distinctive, embossed feel. The paper used for the Supernote was an uncanny replica of the currency stock produced exclusively for the United States government since 1879 by Crane & Company of Dalton, Massachusetts — seventy-five percent cotton, twenty-five percent linen, with embedded red and blue fibres.
   The workmanship of the Supernote was extraordinary. It had sequential serial numbers, and the printing plates continued to be refined. A Secret Service agent identified Kelly’s two samples as Supernotes by three minuscule imperfections. Even when the flaws were pointed out, Kelly says, "I frankly couldn’t see the damn imperfections." (A former employee of the Secret Service’s forensic division says that when a sample of the Supernote first arrived at the agency’s laboratory, in Washington, a top technical analyst "examined it the way he has every other counterfeit note in the world, and called it genuine. ")
   Most alarming of all, the Supernote was so well engineered that it could fool currency scanners at the nation’s twelve Federal Reserve banks. The black ink on the front of American currency contains ferrous oxide, which is magnetic, and the Fed’s scanners read the magnetic field down the center line of the portrait with such precision that a thousand genuine hundred-dollar bills are rejected for every one that is later found to be counterfeit. Yet, Kelly recalls, " Secret Service told me the bills went through those machines. "
   The Supernote, Kelly learned, had been circulating in Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union, but only a limited supply had reached the United States. This was not reassuring. Of the almost three hundred and ninety billion dollars in American paper money now in existence, some two-thirds, or more than two hundred and fifty billion, is in foreign hands. The worldwide popularity of the dollar is a tremendous boon to the United States. As the Federal Reserve is fond of pointing out, every bill in circulation is in effect an interest-free loan; an equivalent amount in government securities would cost the United States more than twenty-five billion dollars in annual interest payments. The beauty of bills stuffed in a mattress in Kazakhstan, for instance, is the good chance that the notes will never be called in. The Supernote was by no means the first foreign-made or foreign-distributed counterfeit of American currency, but because of its frightening and unprecedented quality it seemed singularly poised to damage world confidence in the dollar.
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答案    超级假币
   纸币放到凯利面前，他惊呆了。其中两张假币看上去和真的一模一样。“我处理过不少假币案，我知道假币是什么样子的，”凯利说，“但是这几张看上去像真的一样，摸上去没有异样的感觉。我的意思是，‘要是这真是假的，对美国来说，麻烦可就大了。’”凯利马上给驻波士顿美国财政部特工处办公室打电话。“我说‘这儿有几张特别漂亮的纸币，来自黎巴嫩，’”凯利回忆道。“特工三分半钟后就赶到了。他们十分清楚我反映的问题非同小可。”
   原来，凯利此前已经得到百元面值美元假币的样本，这种假币被叫做“超级假币”，1990年左右出现，源于中东。特工告诉凯利，据他们所知，两年时间里，已经印制了总价值为二、三十亿的假币。这种假币确实非同一般。一般假币都是用那种印刷书籍杂志的胶印机印刷，无论看上去还是摸上去都略显平板，而超级假币是借助用来印刷真正美元的机械设备，用一种叫做凹版印刷的工业流程印出来的，蚀刻板与纸面接触十分有力，造出的纸币字面清晰，有立体感。造假币用的纸张也不含糊，是从1879年起就开始专门为美国政府生产货币专用纸的马萨诸塞州达而顿市克莱恩公司产品的复制品，75％棉，25％亚麻，内嵌红蓝两色纤维条。
   超级假币的制造工艺精致无比。有一条龙的序列编号，制版工艺也在不断地改进。一位特工确认凯利两张假币样品是超级假币，因为有三处微小的瑕疵。即使指出了这些瑕疵，凯利说：“坦率地讲，我实在是看不出这些毛病。”(一位前特工处技侦科雇员说，超级假币第一次送到华盛顿特工处实验室，一位高级技术分析人员“用尽了他用过的所有鉴别假币的办法对假币进行了检验，结果竟然说这是一张真币。”)
   最令人担忧的是，超级假币伪造得如此逼真，它可以骗过全国所有12家联邦储备银行的验钞机。美国货币正面的黑色油墨中含有氧化亚铁，有磁性，联邦验钞机可以读出画像中线以下的磁场，精确度极高。如果混有假币，检测出一张假币，同时将有1000张真币也会被拒绝。但是，凯利回忆道，“特工告诉我，这两张假币竞得以蒙混过关。”
   凯利了解到，超级假币曾在欧洲、远东、中东以及前苏联流行，只有很少一部分流进了美国。然而情况并不乐观。如今流通中的3，900亿美元纸币当中，大约有三分之二即2，500亿美元在外国人手中。美元全球吃香，对美国是件天大的好事。正如美国联邦储备局乐于指出的那样，每一张流通中的美国纸币就是一份免息的贷款；发行相同数量的政府债券美国政府每年要支付250亿美元利息。哈萨克斯坦人家床垫下藏着的美元，它的可贵之处在于这些美元永远不会进入流通领域。超级美元并不是外国人第一次制造发行的美元假币，然而由于超级假币足以乱真的质量令人生畏，世界人民对美元的信任看来会因此而造成很大的损害。
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