The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992

[Stephany Louk-Denney]

While working several cases involving counterfeit money, I recently discovered that my ability to scan the paper bills was blocked. I attempted to document the condition of the paper bills by scanning them before I performed the porous processing sequence. In doing so, I received an error message from my scanner (or scanner software) that I was not allowed to scan the paper bills due The Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Somehow the scanner "recognized" the paper bills and stopped me from scanning. Obviously in our line of work it is necessary to have this ability.

A fruitless call to Epson (that's the brand of my scanner) only led to the customer service rep informing me once again of this law. An attempt to contact the Federal Reserve was made two weeks ago with no response as of this date.

Does anyone know how to gain special permissions to allow scanning of paper bills or know a way around this? Obviously since this is a public board I would prefer responses to be directed to my private email. I'd hate for this information to get into the wrong hands. If you have any advice or information, please contact me at: Stephany.Louk-Denney@mshp.dps.mo.gov.

Thanks,
Stephany

[ER]

Our lab recently ran into this issue as well on two different levels. Some scans were stopped by the scanner itself, while other scans were stopped by Photoshop (we run CS2).

Our workaround for this has been to run photocopies of the bills to document their overall appearance (serial #, etc) and to only scan the developed latents. We still occasionally get the error message blocking the scan, but if we scan a small section of the bill or turn the bill to a slight angle, we have always been able to scan what we need.

Glad to know that we're not the only ones that have run into this.

[Ernie Hamm]

How about using a "Brownie Hawkeye"????

Really!!! Has conventional photography been so relegated by technology with its ease of procedures that it is no longer a viable documentation/recovery procedure?

[Steve Everist]

I haven't had a scanner stop the scanning, but I have had Photoshop stop the opening of the file. The warning popup comes with a link. At the link, it tells the rules by which you can acquire complete scans of currency. If I remember correctly, it had to be at least 150% or less than 75% actual size. It may have needed to be black and white possibly too.

I don't have the link handy and I'm not finding it quickly from the US Treasury's site. But there were acceptable ways to scan entire bills if needed.

[David Fairhurst]

here's the reason your scanner/photocopier won't let you scan the bills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Ba ... ence_Group

[LauraT]

Unless your scanner has software built in to block scanning US currency, Adobe Photoshop 7 and older versions will allow you to scan and print. The newer versions of Photoshop do not allow you to scan US money.