The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [61]
THE OPTICALLY VARIABLE INK—OVI for short—was one of the most technologically advanced security features of the New Note. It appears on the denomination mark on the lower right-hand side of every bill above five dollars. Hold the bill in front of your face, turning it slowly, and the ink will “color-shift” from black to a glittery brass to metallic green, depending on the angle. The ink, produced by a company based in Santa Rosa, California, called Flex Products, is patented technology.
Art assumed it was unobtainable. The best he hoped for was an approximation—a glittery, metallic ink that provided the twinkling illusion of shift, just enough to keep the ruse going. While there was no shortage of glittery inks, none of them were convincing enough, and he once again settled into an uncompromising hunt. By now Art’s eyes were constantly sucking in the shades and colors of his surroundings, his mind parsing them for correlative possibilities. He hoped that if he just kept looking he’d see the ink—or at least a material that mimicked the color-shift effect—somewhere in the world around him.
One day while he was walking through a parking lot in Dallas, he spotted a limited edition 1996 Mustang Cobra. The car itself was enough to inspire Art, a ’Stang connoisseur, to take closer look, but as he approached the vehicle something else caught his eye.
The Mustang’s color shifted, from purple-black to deep blue.
“I kept walking back and forth, watching the color change, and forgot all about the car,” he says. “Hell, I knew right away if I could get ahold of that paint I could buy my own Cobra! That motherfucker was shifting color, just like the denomination mark.”
Within an hour he was ringing auto-body shops and getting the lowdown on Ford’s paint. What he subsequently discovered blew his mind. He learned that the paint contained a patented pigment called ChromaFlair, and although the ’96 Cobra was the first production vehicle to feature it, custom shops had been using it for several years. ChromaFlair came in five different color shifts and was even available in spray-paint form, but the most startling thing about the pigment was its manufacturer: Flex Products, Inc.—the same company that supplied secure color-shifting ink to the BEP and window shading for NASA. Flex had gone ahead and marketed its technology to the private sector, meaning that citizens could legally obtain the same technology behind one of the New Note’s most lauded security features.
And as a private citizen, Art went about obtaining it. Although the green-to-black pigment was exclusive to the B EP, he easily bought a green-to-silver paint that beautifully replicated the true shift. “It was even better because it had a little bit of flash,” he says, “and flash was what people expected when they looked for the shift.” Unfortunately, the ChromaFlair couldn’t be run through an offset press or an ink-jet printer because it was paint, but Art devised a novel solution. He scanned the denomination marks on both the hundred- and five-dollar bills, then touched them up with Photoshop and rearranged the numbers so they read “1005.” He then went to the most ubiquitous printing source on the planet—Kinko’s.
“I’m a small businessman and I need to make an address stamp for my stationery,” he told the clerk, explaining that he liked the font on U.S. currency because “it represents success.” Could Kinko’s convert his 1005 scan into a rubber stamp?
“No problem,” the clerk told him. Of all the proprietary components in U.S. currency, it turns out that the most obvious element—the very style of lettering—is the least controlled. Companies like Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft possess exclusive rights to their fonts, but the most valuable font of all, that of the U.S. dollar, is public property.
Two days later Art picked up his stamp at Kinko’s. He sliced off the 5 with an X-Acto knife, dipped the remaining 100 section into the automotive paint, then applied it to a sheet of newsprint. Once