WELDAH, PA - Citing budget overruns and limited perceived benefit, the U.S. Mint has cancelled plans to rollout the new twenty dollar bill design. "So, if you see any bills with all the new anti-counterfeiting features, don't accept them -- they're counterfeit."

So says the director of the US Mint, Henry Forgurl. "The goal was to create a bill that would be difficult to counterfeit. That meant making a bill that looked somewhat different from what people are used to seeing. So that meant a huge advertising campaign to alert people to the new money's look. To assure them that the bills are genuine, and to assure them that the old bills are still good. That was the intent."

What happened was quite different, however. The advertising campaign served to give the counterfeiters a head start, showing them exactly what a new bill needed to look like. Investigators with the mint, working with the FBI, have discovered caches of counterfeit bills, apparently printed even before the government's own presses had begun printing them. "They got the drop on us," said Forgurl, "and to make matters worse, we blew our whole printing budget on the advertising campaign. So even if we wanted to print the new bills, we don't have the cash."

"This is a disaster," lamented one counterfeiter, who asked that his name not be used, "I and the people in my industry have thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours tied up in this new bill design. And now they're not going to use them?"

The counterfeiting industry is deliberating with its legal counsel to determine what if any lawsuit it can bring against the government to force it to stick to the original plan. "What choice do they have?" asked Ryan Lanteano, lead counsel for the industry, "This decision would set their production schedule back a year, perhaps two. It's an issue for the courts to handle."
(email to a friend)