3D Printed Coins?
Hey guys, super short post today. I was browsing YouTube, as I do many days, when I came across a YouTube short video titled, “Will A 3D Printed Quarter Work In A Gumball Machine?” by the user MysteryMatt (a link to the video will be at the end of this article).
And a quick disclaimer, this is all for educational/research purposes only, do not make counterfeit currency, it is illegal and you will go to jail. By reading this article you are agreeing that I, the author, am not to be held liable for anything you may do after reading this article.
In the video he is testing to see whether a gum ball machine will recognize a 3D printed quarter, and dispense a gum ball. In the video he goes on to his computer, opens his browser and finds a 3D printable model of a United States quarter, and he prints it. It is worth noting, when compared side-by-side with a legitimate quarter, the differences are notable, and figuring out which one is the real coin is not very hard, however, the ridges around the sides of the coin are defined well enough that it seems to be able to trick the machine.
I am no expert on currency, or the methods used by gum ball machines, vending machines, or anything else, which are made to validate coins and protect against fraudulent purchases made with fake currency. However, as a big fan of security research, this had caught my interest, due to the possibilities of this become a widespread problem throughout the near future.
As 3D printing becomes cheaper and cheaper, and the YouTuber who made the video noted that it cost him right around one cent USD to produce this 3D printed quarter, I could see this becoming a more popular form of counterfeiting than paper bills. Being so low in value, this would be impractical for a would-be criminal to use on large purchases, or anything that can’t be purchased in a vending machine, however I found this to be a very interesting experiment, that can show the vulnerabilities of vending machines, in particular these gum ball machines.
Being no expert in vending machine mechanics, I have no idea if this would only work on older models, or if this is a method that would still be possible on newer machines.
This experiment reminds me of seeing kids try to do the old “string in a quarter” trick on vending machines in the early to mid 2000’s. Admittedly, it almost never worked, from what I had heard, but I’m sure at some point it did, or else, where would the kids have gotten the idea from?
Much like the old “string in a quarter” technique was able to bypass actually paying for items in vending machines, 3D printed quarters would be doing much of the same work, however instead of having one quarter that could be used over and over again, like in the string technique, these quarters (at least from what was seen in the video) would be consumed by the machine after each one is deposited, but with it costing about one cent per 3D printed quarter, it could cut down the cost of a vending machine soda from $1.50 to about six cents.
It is interesting to hypothesize not only if this 3D printing method works on modern machines, but if it does, how will vending machine companies adapt to this issue and change their coin verification process to ensure counterfeit coins do not go through their system?
The vending machine industry made around 23 billion USD, globally, in 2018. I’m not sure what percentage of this was in cash payments, I know I personally use plastic much more on these types of machines, but if it were to be, for example, 5 billion USD, if all of these payments were done in counterfeit quarters, it would only cost criminals 200,000 USD to produce 5 billion USD worth of fake quarters, not counting 3D printer maintenance costs, and etc.
Here is my math:
5,000,000,000 dollars spent in cash annually for our example
That would be 20,000,000,000 quarters
If every quarter was counterfeit, and only worth one cent it would cost criminals about 200,000 USD
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting topic, I hope you found it as interesting as I did. Below are links to the original video I saw that inspired me to write this, and an article that gave me the statistics on how much the global vending industry is making annually. Thanks for reading!
Video:
Article:
