ALTERED HAWAII SILVER CERTIFICATES

Here are two more alterations to make a note look like a Hawaii Emergency note and another to look like a Philippine Victory note. Both were probably not done by counterfeiters, but by less knowledgeable individuals who wanted to spoof or play a trick on someone, or else by some person that had a note that had been invalidated and he wanted to recoup some of its value.

Below you can compare a real Hawaii note against an altered silver certificate with Hawaiian overprints. The first thing that should catch your eye is the seal that is blue instead of the brown seal on Hawaiian Series notes. Then notice that the signatures on this note are Priest-Humphrey, not Julian-Morgenthau that should be on a Hawaiian Series note. Priest-Humphrey did not appear on notes until January 1953, long after the Hawaiian Series was printed. Additionally, the serial number block on the questionable note is PH. There were no PH block notes used in the Hawaiian Series. The Hawaiian Series notes were overprinted from eight partial blocks: YB, ZB, AC, CC, FC, LC, PC and SC. The backs of the notes show differences in letter spacing and small differences in the shape of some of the letters.

 

 

Under magnification, it is obvious that the overprint was computer generated. The computer is unable to draw the diagonal line from the A in Hawaii on the back, so it stair steps its way to an approximation of the slanted line. On the face we see the small Hawaii letters are the computer-generated letters with a lot of dots. The magnified scans of the fake Hawaii note are compared to a magnified scan of a genuine note for your comparison. Since we established that the fake overprint was computer generated, the Editor reminded me that we didn't have personal computers until the late seventies or early eighties, this gives us an earliest time frame for this spoof. He was correct and that gives us a much later date for this alteration.

 

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web