John C. Brice muttered something about... :: ::The Secret Service is a division of the Treasury Department. One of their ::main duties is tracking down counterfeiters. If someone has stolen a color ::copy machine, there's a very good chance that it was stolen for the end ::purpose of counterfeiting. So I would imagine that that would be why the ::SS would be looking for this particular stolen property. Make sense? That's ridiculous. I hate to start a flame-war, but if I decided that I desperately needed a color copier but didn't want to spend that money and figured I'd just steal one, why would there be a good chance that I'd be doing this to start a counterfeiting process? Maybe I just want to make color copies. If you truly believe that this would be the main impetus for anyone stealing on of these devices you're thinking in the same ballpark as those who we fight against with cryptography. Additionally, it's only possible to photocopy $1, $5 and $10 because anything larger than that has that funny little strip of plastic in the bill. e x t r a p o l a t e steve j. white _____________________________________________________________________________ Gort, klatu barada nicto. aragorn@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu -< I think the general point is that the secret service has authority when there is a counterfeiting case. I don't know the particulars but in this case, if the secret service showed up, you can bet they had authority. Agencies are very possesive about jurisdiction. Surely in this case the secret service was looking for the copier because they had reason to believe it was being used in counter- feiting. That said, it's not too difficult to guess that they had a good deal of information about the suspect and the copier already and thus it's not real strange that they managed to track down the copier quickly. As for photocopying 1, 5's and 10's only, you seem to assume that all the 20's and 50's without the polyester/foil strip in them have been removed from circulation. I got a silver certificate in change the other day if that tells you anything about how likely that is. (the 1988 series bills had no such strip...) -uni- (Dark)