“To make these bills, you need 10 to 12 people,” said Geraldo Chavez (not his real name), the counterfeiter. “One runs the machine, there is a designer, you have someone in charge of the supplies – the paper, the inks – you need someone to cut the bills, someone outside watching. The packer. At a minimum eight people, but usually eight to 12 people for the production to come out right.”
“The printer has to be skilled,” said Don Brewer, who spent 26 years with the US secret service and became head of the agency’s anti-counterfeiting division. “They need to be artistic and meticulous. Because offset begins by photographing the money, the negative is the key. But the negative fails to hold all the detail of the original, so it has to be touched up by hand. In many counterfeit plants we raided, we would find large negative blowups that were used to add detail.”