New C-Note Celebrates Birthday

One year after its introduction, the newly designed $100 bill appears to be accepted at home and abroad and - more importantly - seems to be deterring counterfeiting.

Not that there haven’t been attempts - from the serious to the silly. The first try, less than two weeks after the bills’ debut on March 25, 1996, occurred when a Gilbert, W.Va., teen-ager used his computer to make several versions - some with his own portrait in place of Ben Franklin’s.

Police said he apparently didn’t intend to use any. But his uncle was charged with trying to pass one at a McDonald’s restaurant.

In the largest, more serious attempt to date, four men from Kingston, Jamaica, were charged with printing more than $10 million in bogus C-notes in Miami.

According to a federal indictment, they attempted to reproduce a key new security feature - the color-shifting “100” in the notes’ lower right corner. On genuine bills, the number appears green when viewed straight on but black when viewed at an angle.

Some customers are getting burned by counterfeit new notes, even though they’re not of high quality, said a bank security director.

“The merchant has a feel for the old bills and generally can identify them up front,” said Boris Melnikoff, senior vice president of Wachovia Corp. in Atlanta. “But the new bills, being something entirely new, are being readily accepted.”

However, Charles J. Bock Jr., director of fraud prevention and investigation for Chase Manhattan Corp. in New York, called the new notes “a phenomenal success.”

From the introduction of the new notes through December, the Secret Service seized $2 million fakes of the new design and $96.9 million of the old design.

Even with the addition of the Miami case, only $14.5 million in phony new notes have been seized through March 15, compared with total counterfeiting of all denominations of $268 million.

The redesign, the first since 1929, was launched when counterfeiting was perceived as a growing problem. A so-called supernote had surfaced in Lebanon, where local officials estimated in 1995 that $2 billion in phony notes had been manufactured.

Treasury Department officials are pushing ahead with plans to issue a redesigned $50 note this fall and a new $20 bill next year. Redesigned $10, $5 and $1 notes would follow.