Rogers was burnt alive. The gruesome forms of punishment were due to the two's acts being construed as "treason", rather than simple crime. In America, counterfeiting also used to be punishable by death; for example, paper currency printed by Benjamin Franklin often bore the phrase "to counterfeit is death."[2] The theory behind such harsh punishments was that one who had the skills to counterfeit currency was considered a threat to the safety of the state, and had to be eliminated. Far more fortunate was an earlier practitioner of the same art, active in the time of the Emperor Justinian, who got the nickname Alexander the Barber. Rather than being executed, when he was caught the Emperor decided to employ his financial talents in the government's own service.
Modern counterfeiting begins with paper money. Nations have used counterfeiting as a means of warfare. The idea is to overflow the enemy's economy with fake bank notes, so that the real value of the money plummets. Great Britain did this during the Revolutionary War to reduce the value of the Continental Dollar. Although this tactic was also employed by the United States during the American Civil War, the fake Confederate currency it produced was of superior quality to the real thing.
A form of counterfeiting is the production of documents by legitimate printers in response to fraudulent instructions. An example of this is the Portuguese Bank Note Crisis of 1925, when the British banknote printers Waterlow and Sons produced Banco de Portugal notes equivalent in value to 0.88% of the Portuguese nominal Gross Domestic Product, with identical serial numbers to