IStock Photo 8290919 © Wendell Franks

Today, the United States Treasury unveiled a new design for the $100 bill in an attempt to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters and their increasingly high tech forgeries of US Banknotes, the $100 in particular.

When you picture the Secret Service you probably think of men wearing dark suits, ear pieces, and a worried look. The president’s life is in their hands, but when the Secret Service was first conceived in 1865 it was designed to spot counterfeit dollar bills, not would-be assassins.

By the end of the Civil War, between one-third and one-half of all US currency was counterfeit, and the Secret Service was established to combat the problem. Even though the first director was appointed only months after Abraham Lincoln was shot, it took two more presidential assassinations—James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901—before the Secret Service was tasked with protecting the President.

To this day, the Secret Service still remains responsible for investigating cases of counterfeiting, and together with the efforts of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department a remarkable record of success has been achieved.

Of all the dollars in circulation, just 1 in 12,240 is counterfeit. That means that of the more than $600 billion currently in circulation, just $50 million worth of phony bills has the chance to get into a wallet or the cash register of a corner grocery store.

However, the majority of counterfeit money never gets that far. In 2002, the Secret Service seized $130 million in forged notes before they ever made it into the economy, as compared to the $44 million worth that was found in use. There’s still an unknown quantity of counterfeit bills which might have reached circulation and haven’t been discovered, although the Treasury Department claims it’s highly unlikely that a large number of such bills could lie undetected for long given the nature of currency usage and flows.

In theory, the rapid proliferation of digital imaging technology has made it easier to counterfeit notes. The Treasury estimates that it would cost less than $2,000 to buy all the necessary hardware and software to make a “reasonably deceptive” counterfeit. 1 in 2.78 forged dollars in circulation in 2002 were printed digitally and an incredible 1 in 1.17 arrests for counterfeiting were inkjet related, as compared to 1 in 200 and 1 in 50.16 in 1995, respectively. But unfortunately for those looking to pass a bad twenty, digitally produced bills are easy to spot with proper training. Only notes produced by intaglio and typographic methods can ever be highly deceptive; overall, just 1 in 39.58 counterfeit dollars is classified as such.

And the Treasury Department made the counterfeiter’s job far more difficult when it redesigned bills in 1996—adding an enlarged offset portrait, a watermark, and color-shifting ink. Just 1 in 43,180 $100 bills of the new design, known as NCD, were found to be counterfeit in 2002 versus 1 in 5,461 of the old type. $13.4 million worth of highly deceptive pre-NCD notes passed through the economy between 1996 and 2002, versus just $1.2 million of NCD notes.

If you are concerned you might have a fake bill, look hard at your big notes, not the small ones. Hundred dollar bills in circulation are 40 times more likely to be counterfeit than $1 bills. About 1 in 32,570 $100 bills that arrive at the Federal Reserve turn out to be forged.

A Food Lion customer in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina successfully used a fake $200 bill imprinted with a likeness of George W. Bush to pay for $150 dollars of groceries.

And then there was the Georgia woman who presented a Wal-Mart cashier with a million dollar bill for $1671.55 in purchases. She did not stop to collect her $998,328.45 in change. She went directly to jail.