Color Laser Printers and Counterfeiting
 

WASHINGTON--Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&u=/pcworld/20041122/tc_pcworld/118664&printer=1

Is it possible to intercept mail I've already sent?

Interesting...................very interesting.....I guess I need to burn that $100,000,000 in bills I just made to retire on and go back to work.... :eek:

Counterfeiting with a color laser? I'm just trying to printout the snoopy.bas program pic of Snoopy on his doghouse with my Epson MX-80. :D

I have a color laser printer and a Eposon 740 inkjet........neither will make copies that will fool anyone but a seriously far sighted person who forgot their reading glasses.

And mine will do 1,200 DPI

But I know there is pro gear that does far better.

I work on Xerox color laser printers, 2045, 2060, 6060 and that is very true. You can see very little yellow dots with a 10x eyeloop, and magnified further the machine serial number can be extracted. It won't copy money anyway. The color of the money set off a machine program that delivers your copied money in a different color. Some machines will even shutdown with a hard-fault code. :bulb:

Any inside info in how to bypass that?


Cough cough.....for purely educational purposes of course.

It's not only scanners and printers; graphic applications like Adobe's Photoshop won't let you work with the new designed dollar bills.

Why waste your time on the new bills when the old ones still work great???

Too bad Dan Rather didn't read this story feed before it was too late.

Exactly,

You just get a nice old 20, no 'color shifting ink' or 'watermarks' to fool with.