Dauntless wrote:wasn't there a para or two in torch of freedom about this.
during the BSC's sting op on parmley station there was a paragraph or two about a box which had the money in and how it had to handled carefully as if fake money went in then the depostiee could have their hand taken off.
Ah, now that you mention it I seem to remember something about that - though it may not have been in ToF.
What I did find in ToF was
Torch of Freedom: Ch 40 wrote:Jurgen Dusek had been a knee-breaker, a contract killer, a pimp, a drug dealer, a counterfeiter (of welfare chits, not money; nobody in their right mind tried to pass fake money on Mesa)
Ah, I took a little longer and I did find the scene that I think we were both thinking of. But it didn't have any specific mention of counterfeiting.
Torch of Freedom: Ch 10 wrote:Normal electronic fund transfers were entirely out of the question for an illegal transaction like this one. Despite all the ingenuity and sophistication of the current generation's practitioners of the ancient art of "money laundering," normal fund transfers left too many electronic footprints for anyone to be comfortable about. Besides, slavers—like smugglers and pirates—were not natively trusting souls.
Fortunately, it wasn't always possible to rely on normal electronic transfers, even when both parties to the transfers in question were as pure as the new fallen snow. Which was why physical fund transfers were still possible. As the female crewmember stepped forward, Hutchins punched in the combination to unlock the battle steel box, and its lid slid smoothly upward. Inside were several dozen credit chips, issued by the Banco de Madrid of Old Earth. Each of those chips was a wafer of molecular circuitry embedded inside a matrix of virtually indestructible plastic. That wafer contained a bank validation code, a numerical value, and a security key (whose security was probably better protected than the Solarian League Navy's central computer command codes), and any attempt to change the value programmed into it when it was originally issued would trigger the security code and turn it into a useless, fused lump. Those chips were recognized as legal tender anywhere in the explored galaxy, but there was no way for anyone to track where they'd gone, or—best of all from the slavers' perspective—whose hands they'd passed through, since the day they'd been issued by the Banco de Madrid.
The crewwoman didn't actually reach for the credit chips, of course. That sort of thing simply wasn't done. Besides, she knew as well as Hutchins did that if she'd been foolish enough to insert her hand into that box, the automatically descending lid would have removed it quite messily. Instead, she produced a small hand unit, aimed it in the direction of the chips, and studied the readout. She gazed at it for a moment, making certain that the amount on the readout matched the one Hutchins' superiors had agreed to, then nodded.
"Looks good," she said, and held out her hand.
You'd obviously need the very well protected security key in order to forge cryptographically protected credit chits (or find a crypto "break" in what is presumably a very well studied algorithm) - but it's certainly not impossible for someone with access to a Bank's cryptography credit-creation key to be turned or pressured into copying it.
