A unique sample book of Russian bank note proofs grabbed the top honors in the H.R. Harmer Inc. Oct. 17 to 19 auction of material originally from the American Bank Note Co. archives.

The album sold for $70,000 including the 15 percent buyer’s fee. The bid helped hoist the total auction prices realized over the million dollar mark at $1,103,683.70, according to Dr. Robert Schwartz, a New York City dentist who has been in the paper money, stamps and scrip-ophily (the study and collecting of canceled stocks and bonds) businesses for 20 years, and who wrote the catalog for this auction.

The sample album, circa 1910 to 1920, includes rare bank notes on the first seven pages and additional loose bank note back proofs and vignettes mounted on card. The overall condition of the book and its contents ranges from About Uncirculated to Uncirculated with minor edge faults on one or two items, according to the catalog. [Full Article] (more…)

Adapted from an autobiography by Holocaust survivor Adolf Burger, the Austrian Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film The Counterfeiters tells the true story of Operation Bernhard, the largest counterfeiting operation in history. Set up by the Nazis in 1936 in an effort to weaken Allied economies by flooding them with fake banknotes, it was carried out by detainees in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where a unit of jailed printers, typographers, graphic artists and others were overseen by Nazi camp guards.

The Counterfeiters is a suspense-filled, engaging and entertaining film. It is also very uncomfortable to watch, not just because of the horrors is depicts and insinuates, but also because it pushes us to judge the men in the ‘Golden Cage’. (more…)

BRITISH police say Ross Cowie is the audacious frontman of a counterfeit gang that sought to defraud the Bank of England out of $64 billion.

His Australian family says the 62-year-old grandfather is a patsy.

“That’s the word we’ve been bandying about,” his daughter Tiffany Cowie said yesterday. “In any business relationship, if you’re performing contracted work for other people, it’s a situation where you have to take the word of people you’re associating with.”

In this instance, Cowie’s associates and fellow defendants are five Chinese nationals - and a New Zealander still at large. It’s not disputed Cowie was their point man.

The question to be settled over the next six weeks in Southwark Crown Court is whether or not Cowie was suckered into believing a story so crazy it could never, as it turned out, be true. To wit, six Chinese people, aged between 109 and 116 years, had been hoarding £28billion from pre-Communist days. They had decided to exchange the money for modern notes and share it among their offspring.

The yarn goes from quirky to quackery with claims that the cash included a small mountain of £1000 notes, which were in circulation until 1943 - and only 63 are said to remain outside the bank’s vaults - and the inclusion of hundreds of special issue £500,000 notes that, in fact, never existed. Read Full Article

KEOKUK — The coins and paper currency spread along the display tables at the River City Mall Saturday came in all shapes and sizes.

Double-sized dollar bills from the 1920s required a double-take just to make sure they were real, and brightly colored paper money originating in every country from Japan to Brazil looked like Monopoly bills to the untrained eye.

But all the money at the Keokuk Coin Club and Hobby Show had one thing in common. Every red (and non-red) cent is a piece of history. “It’s a piece of history you can hold in your hands,” said Keokuk Coin Club member Keith Bruns.

Bruns’ most prized piece of money is a $3 bill from 1857 that was issued by the city of Keokuk. Unlike the predictable designs of modern money, the art on the back showcases a couple of men, one on a horse, overlooking a river. Read Full Story