actually conterfeiting these days is quite easy, the main
ingredient is the paper, how the russians syndicates originally
came up with the idea was to first collect a lot a lot of US 1
dollar.
Then they shreded all of it to get the base paper material, then
they put in bleach boiled and washed everything and pressed/rolled
into thin flat sheets, then using laser printing equipment start
printing/cutting denominations of US $10 $20(commonly
used/exchanged everyday that people don't really take notice) in
the end it looks and feels like the real thing .. ingenious these
russian crooks using $1 to make $10 and I believe thats how the
china syndicates are printing their fake RMB notes also.
And thats I think why we starting printing our smaller
denominations on plastic to prevent syndicates from using the same
idea. 
