How Is Fake Money is Printed? Inside North Korea's Dollar Factory

You're at an airport, ready to board a flight.

You exchange some money before leaving, something every traveler does.

The teller hands you a stack of crisp $100 bills.

They feel authentic.

The right texture, the subtle ink colors, and the watermark are perfectly aligned.

Even the smell is just like the bills you've seen a million times.

But later, at your hotel, the clerk notices something strange.

He holds one bill up to the light, flips it over, and squints.

Then his face changes.

This can't be right.

These aren't ordinary counterfeit bills.

They're super notes, fake $100 bills so flawlessly made they fooled banks, ATMs, and even U.S.

Government experts for decades.

What if one of history's most perfect forgeries was quietly flooding the world and you'd never hear about it?

December 1989, Central Bank of the Philippines, Manila.

A stack of $100 bills lands on a teller's desk during what should be a routine exchange.

The man handing them over is calm, well-dressed, and claims to represent a foreign investor.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

The bills look perfect, feel perfect.

And pass every test the bank throws at them.

But something makes the employee freeze.

Maybe it's the serial numbers.

Too clean, too uniform.

Instead of accepting them, the teller quietly passes the bills to his supervisor and starts asking questions.

Sir, where did you get these notes?

But the man's calm suddenly vanishes.

Without a word, he turns and walks away briskly, then breaks into a run.

He disappears before security can reach him.

That's when things get serious.

The suspicious bills get packed and shipped halfway across the world to the US Secret Service headquarters in Washington, DC There, the bill becomes case number C-14342.

Now imagine investigators going full forensic on those bills using every tool in their arsenal first.

Ultraviolet light reveals how real bills glow thanks to special security fibers and inks embedded during printing.

Counterfeits often fail this glow test.

Next, they examine the printing with powerful microscopes.

Real bills use intaglio printing.

Which presses ink deep into the paper, creating a raised texture you can feel.

They also use spectroscopic analysis, shining different wavelengths of light to study the ink's chemical makeup, spotting subtle differences invisible to the naked eye.

Finally, they analyze serial numbers with digital magnification, hunting for spacing errors or suspicious patterns counterfeiters often miss.

Each test on its own can raise doubts, but together they form a near-impossible forensic trap for fake bills.

But what they find is jaw-dropping.

These counterfeiters managed to reproduce the same paper recipe as real US bills, 75% cotton, 25% linen, the special blend only legally made by Crane Paper Company for the US Treasury.

This is not some cheap paper you pick up at the corner store.

But here's the wild part.

The bills were printed on the same type of intaglio presses the US government uses.

Massive $5,000,000 seventy-ton machines that don't just sit in any print shop.

Take a look at this 1989 $100 bill.

While this one's real, it's nearly identical to a counterfeit that fooled a lot of people until experts spotted 2 microscopic clues.

First, there was a tiny gap right beside Franklin's portrait, so small you'd need a microscope to see it.

And 2nd, the lamppost in the background had a slightly thicker line than it should have.

These tiny imperfections were all it took to unravel the forgery.

The bill earned its infamous nickname, the Original Super note, a perfect fake crafted to fool everyone.

But who was behind it?

Where did it come from?

The first clues don't come from spy satellites or defectors.

They come from patterns, from the way the money moves through the shadows of international finance.

Fake $100 bills surface in Hong Kong casinos, where high-stakes gamblers exchange millions in cash.

They appear in Russian black markets, where desperate citizens trade rubles for dollars.

They pass through diplomatic pouches in European airports, protected by immunity laws that prevent customs inspection.

But what links all of them isn't the destination.

It's the precision.

The bills are too good, too identical.

Every single fake bears the same microscopic flaws, the same perfect reproduction of security features, the same impossible attention to detail.

That was the red flag.

The second was a series of arrests.

In 1994, five North Korean diplomats were detained carrying $430,000 in counterfeit $100 bills.

Two years later, in 1996, a woman with a North Korean passport was caught in Cambodia with hundreds of thousands more.

Always the same bills, always the same eerie perfection, always the same microscopic signatures that mark them as products of a single, highly sophisticated operation.

U.S. intelligence starts connecting the dots, and slowly, one name begins surfacing in internal reports.

Room 39.

This is the mysterious Workers' Party headquarters in Pyongyang.

On its third floor, there's a secret office.

It's Room 39.

This place will do anything to make money for North Korea's elite.

For years, it's operated as a hidden headquarters, generating billions for the country's wealthiest and most powerful.

Room 39 was the mob boss behind the curtain.

This shadow organization didn't appear on any official government chart.

No North Korean official would admit it existed, but intelligence agencies knew it as one of the most sophisticated criminal enterprises in modern history.

But here's the brutal reality.

North Korea's currency wasn't internationally traded.

No one wanted North Korean won.

The suppliers selling them missile components and nuclear materials only wanted one thing: hard currency.

They wanted dollars.

The regime needed to generate that sort of hard currency through any means necessary, and counterfeiting became their lifeline.

The mastermind behind it all?

Kim Jong-un himself, the eccentric dictator who was positioning himself to inherit control of the world's most isolated nation when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

North Korea lost its main source of economic aid.

Instead of seeking international aid, the regime chose a different path.

If it couldn't earn dollars through legitimate trade, it would print them hidden behind multiple layers of razor wire fences, concrete walls, and buzzing surveillance cameras.

This is Printing Plant 62.

The secret nerve center of North Korea's infamous super node operation.

Imagine a fortress sprawling over several acres, surrounded by at least three tight security perimeters, each guarded by heavily armored soldiers, ready to stop anyone who gets too close.

See those towers with search lights and sniper posts?

They're watching your every move.

The main building.

It's a cold fortress-like structure, about four stories tall, made of reinforced concrete with almost no windows because secrecy is everything here.

This is no ordinary print shop.

The paper supply chain was equally sophisticated through Hong Kong shell companies.

The operation sourced the exact cotton linen blend used for authentic US currency.

The suppliers believed they were fulfilling orders for high-end stationery.

Instead, their products were being shipped to a secret facility in North Korea.

The microprinting features, 140 thousandths of an inch high on super notes, were undetectably identical to real bills.

There was no difference that experts could detect between them and genuine currency.

Here's the genius part.

North Korea didn't just craft near-perfect counterfeit bills; they intentionally embedded tiny flaws into their super notes.

Intelligence experts believe these microscopic imperfections acted like a secret signature, allowing North Korea to spot when others tried to flood the market with cheap copies of their already fake money.

As the US Treasury introduced new security features, Plant 62 somehow managed to keep pace.

New watermark designs, enhanced microprinting, updated thread placement.

All were reverse-engineered and replicated with disturbing efficiency.08:59

By the mid-1990s, North Korea had weaponized the US dollar itself, turning America's currency into a tool of financial attack.

The United States had been patient for years.

But by the late 1990s, the scope of the supernode operation had become too large to ignore.

In 1996, the US Treasury unveiled a completely redesigned $100 bill.

Franklin's portrait was enlarged and repositioned.

The watermark was updated.

The security thread was moved and enhanced.

It was a message to Pyongyang.

We know what you're doing, we're watching, and we're adapting faster than you can keep up.

But North Korea's response was even more audacious.

Less than two years later, the first counterfeit of the big head Franklin surfaced in a London bank.

Somehow, through industrial espionage, Pyongyang had obtained the exact pigment formulation used by the US Treasury.

The special color-shifting ink was manufactured by a Swiss company under strict licensing agreements.

Yet North Korea had somehow acquired enough to produce thousands of perfect counterfeits.

But the United States had more weapons than just printing technology.

It had the full investigative power of the FBI.

Operation Royal Charm resembled something from a Hollywood thriller.

FBI agents spent months constructing false identities, infiltrating Asian trafficking networks by posing as corrupt messengers willing to transport anything for the right price.

The operation's centerpiece was an audacious sting aboard a luxury yacht anchored off Atlantic City.

Agents created an entirely fictional wedding celebration, complete with formal invitations and catering services.

When suspected supernote smugglers arrived expecting champagne toasts, they found handcuffs and federal arrest warrants instead.

Operation Smoking Dragon went even deeper into the criminal underworld.

For 18 months, undercover agents embedded themselves within Chinese and Taiwanese smuggling rings, documenting every step of the counterfeit currency pipeline.

They watched as supernotes were hidden inside hollowed-out books, sewn into fabric bolts, and even stuffed inside children's toys shipped through legitimate cargo containers.

But the most fascinating case emerged from Las Vegas, where the FBI tracked a Taiwanese businessman.

This is Chen Chang Liu.

Who went by Wilson?

Wilson had built a successful business in the early 1990s, but rapidly started doing business with North Koreans.

Wilson's business front was vague.

Import, export, leather goods.

But he was addicted to gambling, particularly gambling with super notes, where he couldn't lose.

His scam was ingenious.

Wilson would play penny slot machines using Supernote $100 bills.

He would insert the fake hundreds, play just a few rounds, then cancel his ticket.

He would take the token to the cashier and request his money back, receiving $90.00 in genuine currency after playing only 10.

In just one weekend, Wilson could launder $10,000 in fake bills into $9000 in real cash.

The casinos had video cameras recording his activities.

With help from the Secret Service, they examined his transactions in detail.

The videos, later used as evidence, showed undercover FBI agent Bob Hammer meeting with Wilson at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena.

Also present was John Yoo, a criminal contact who imported counterfeit cigarettes and helped set up the conspiracy.

When federal agents finally moved to shut down the network, they executed coordinated raids across multiple countries.

The final tally?

$4.5 million in seized counterfeit currency, 87 federal indictments, and the dismantling of smuggling networks that operated undetected for more than a decade.

While FBI agents were rolling up smuggling networks, the Treasury Department was preparing a financial weapon that would prove far more effective than any criminal prosecution.

In September 2005, the US Treasury identified Banco Delta Asia, a small but influential bank in Macau, as a primary money laundering concern.

Within hours, the US government froze $25 million in North Korean accounts.

These were the personal accounts of top regime officials whose loyalty depended on access to hard currency.

To put that in perspective, $25 million could fund North Korea's entire foreign diplomatic and intelligence apparatus for roughly 3 to 4 months, based on estimated annual operating budgets that experts suggest range between 70 million and $100 million for overseas missions and covert operations.

The psychological impact was immediate and devastating.

Banks across Asia, terrified of being designated as money laundering concerns, stopped doing business with North Korea almost overnight.

For a regime that depended on foreign currency to maintain power, the financial isolation was catastrophic.

North Korea couldn't pay its diplomats stationed overseas.

It couldn't purchase critical industrial equipment.

It couldn't even maintain the basic operations of its international trading companies.

But then, suddenly, the administration pulled the plug.

North Korea had indicated willingness to return to the Six-Party Talks about nuclear weapons proliferation.

The Six Party Talks, launched in 2003, were a diplomatic effort aimed at persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic aid and normalized relations.

North Korea would freeze or dismantle parts of its nuclear program, and in return, the other parties would provide fuel and diplomatic recognition at the time.

Pyongyang accelerated in nuclear ambitions, having already withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 2003 and claimed possession of nuclear weapons by 2005.

The stakes were enormous.

Intelligence reports suggested that North Korea had enough fissile material for several nuclear warheads and was rapidly developing missile systems capable of reaching Japan, South Korea, and potentially the US West Coast.

The condition North Korea set was that all sanctions in the pipeline would stop.

The irony was perfect.

North Korea's weapons had been turned against it by counterfeiting U.S. dollars.

The regime had made itself completely dependent on the very financial system it was trying to undermine.

From a tiny flaw next to Franklin's face to a hidden plant outside Pyongyang, North Korea turned US currency into a tool of geopolitical sabotage.

And the US struck back with redesigned bills and financial pressure.

The battle isn't over.

Every security feature on today's cache is a response to that secret war.

Bye for now.