Member of Parliament Chidambaram Palaniappan of India has proposed a new law to make production, circulation or smuggling of counterfeit currency a terrorist activity in India. This is one of many attempts by the MP to classify actions that compromise economic security as terrorist threats.

Under the current draft of the law, no differentiation is made between the intended uses of the money. In other words, someone who intends to use the counterfeit money to finance bomb making and someone who intends to use the counterfeit money to finance a shopping spree at the mall are treated the same.

INKSURE has been talking a lot about the need to explore more anti-counterfeiting options for coins. In The Anti-Counterfeiting Blog and the recent paper Taggants: The Machine Readable Authentication Solution for Coins we warn of increased coin counterfeiting and give various reasons for why we think coin anti-counterfeiting should be given the same amount attention as banknote security.

Well, it turns out we are not alone. Currency News, just published the editorial Are Notes and Coins So Different? Unite We Say!

Counterfeiting and banknotes go hand in hand. There are several conferences devoted to the subject of banknote anti-counterfeiting every year and even more that devote part of their agenda to this topic. 

One of the major responsibilities of central banks is to keep currency from being counterfeited. This involves creating robust anti-countering solutions for their currency…every couple of years. Once a new solution is implemented, the replacement for it starts being reseached. Part of any central bank's anti-counterfeiting strategy involves changing the technology, design and other components of the currency so that counterfeiters do not have time to crack the security.  

Over 190 professionals gathered at the first Coin Conference on May 31-June 1 2011 where coin anti-counterfeiting was a major topic. Our own Tal Gilat gave a presentation about the possibilities of using taggants as an anti-counterfeiting option for coins. Tal's presentation was received with great interest from the Coin Conference audience, the majority of who were representatives of central banks, currency issuing authorities and mints.

We have recently received a lot of skepticism about the issue of coin anti-counterfeiting. Many think coin counterfeiting is not really an issue and therefore exploring anti-counterfeiting solutions for coins is a waste of time. But 190 professionals representing a wide range of coin experts disagree. Just because a problem is not widely publicized does not mean it is not an issue.