Major Diebold Voting Machine Security Hole Discovered... Again

Japan Misprints Some New Currency; Vending Machines Out Of Luck

from the whoops dept

Thu, May 11th 2006 2:50am — Mike Masnick

With high quality printing methods getting increasingly less expensive, it keeps getting easier for scammers to print counterfeit money. As a result, treasuries around the world have been more proactive in regularly changing their currencies and continually adding various anti-counterfeiting systems to the bills. Since cash is going to stay around for a while it's worth thinking about the impact rapidly changing currency can have. For example, vending machines that accept currency need to be able to keep up with the changes -- which could be quite a challenge. However, in Japan, it's become a bit more challenging -- mainly because the National Printing Bureau screwed up when printing up some of its new currency. The Raw Feed points out that some sort of printing glitch with the new bills means that nearly 40,000 bills don't work in vending machines throughout Japan. The bills still look the same, and the Bank of Japan claims they're still valid currency... just not to any vending machine. The National Printing Bureau, however, admits that while they may be valid, technically, the bills are "defective," but no recall will be put in place. Of course, no one indicates if there's any way to update the vending machines -- but with only 40,000 defective bills out there, perhaps it's just not worth it. Either way, you'd have to think that vending machine owners are not happy about this development.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

14 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Lamer, 11 May 2006 @ 3:55am

First post!
Looks like the venders got 0wned!

BWAHAHAHA!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
daleeinc.com, 11 May 2006 @ 4:53am

DOH
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Arban, 11 May 2006 @ 5:43am

Call in the Collectors
If I were in Japan, I would be checking the validity of new currancy in vending machines and storing away the defective bill as a collectors item.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Thursday, 11 May 2006 @ 5:43am

Some people will comment on anything.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Kyle, 11 May 2006 @ 6:02am

AHH!! I live in Japan!! As far as "vendors" goes, there are tons of machines. I'd say about 4 for every 30 feet of city streets in Tokyo.

Unlike the US, Japan uses vending machines for everything. Many restraunts have replaced cashiers with ticket dispensing machines. The train/subway tickets and prepaid passes are sold via machine. There are even vending machines for beer, tobacco, batteries, underwear and ties to name a few of the unusual ones.

The idea of testing bills using the machines is good but some machines only give change in coins so I may end up carrying a lot of change. (roughly $10 is the smallest paper bill)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
?, 11 May 2006 @ 6:35am

Only 40,000
If you live in Japan, you would be lucky to find one of the bills, and I'll bet the problem completely dissappears within the next six months as bills in circulation don't circulate for very long.

The odd bills will either be collected by the BOJ and disposed of, or collectors will figure out how to identify the bills and put them in nifty looking picture frames.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Peter Rambo, 11 May 2006 @ 6:46am

I don't imagine it will be a big deal.
As Kyle says, the 1000 yen bill is the smallest bill they use. When I was there I almost always used change in the vending machines. The Japanese tend to carry around a lot of cash (perhaps because the vending machines don't take credit/debit cards) so unless they're down to their last bill after the post office closes, they should be fine.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
mousey, 11 May 2006 @ 9:58am

well, since there are like 5000 vending machines every square inch of the country ... i wish i had those defective bills when i spent all that money on dollar and a half 8 ounce bottles of icky qoo!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Kevin Randall, 11 May 2006 @ 10:06am

Hmm
I am not surprised
[ link to this | view in thread ]
TheBlissfulWizard, 11 May 2006 @ 10:09am

Credits
I'm surprised that Japan isn't well ahead of the US in the means to eliminate paper currency all together.
I hardly carry any currency on me at all, I use my checkcard for everything. And I know there are vending machines capable of taking credit cards.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Kyle, 11 May 2006 @ 5:43pm

Actually, Japan is moving ahead quite well. Cash is still the dominant means of payment and many shops still do not accept credit cards but Japan seems to be skipping the credit card and moving directly to wireless payments. Many phones here are able to transmit payments for small items such as tobacco, drinks etc. I'm not quite sure how this works (RFID?) but it is definetly spreading.

Interestingly, those shops that do take credit cards do not require signatures.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Calidan, 12 May 2006 @ 8:27pm

?????
Who in their right mind is going to put 40,000 yen (which is around 400 dollars) in a vending machine? The most I ever put in was 5,000 and that was only because I didn't have enough change on me.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
maharudra, 3 Oct 2008 @ 4:24am

how to identify currency
hi! can you tell me how should we identify currency from machine, what is the circuit diagram fir it so, please can you give information about that,thanks
[ link to this | view in thread ]
bruce, 17 Feb 2009 @ 11:50am

What about the vending machine owners?
Well,the article has briefly defined about the misprints of the currency by vending machines but there might be some way to get ride of it. ---------------------------------------------------------- bruce real estate
[ link to this | view in thread ]