Detecting forged bank notes is getting more and more difficult, especially when you’re travelling abroad and all notes resemble the monopoly variety. They’ve got an answer for this problem in Japan (the home to so much cool stuff) by way of the hand held counterfeit detector.

The counterfeit detector resembles a flash drive and uses UV to scan patterns and a mag reader to read magnetic code that is used across the world in real bills (or notes to us UK folk). I never realised there was a universal marking like this (learn something every day).

I reckon it’s a cool idea and could save a fair few tourists from getting fleeced, though I didn’t like how they had a photograph of London on the Japanese site, what are they trying to say!

Japanese product info over at rakuten, found via Crave and Tokyo Mango