By WILLIAM J. KOLE
AP

Benjamin Franklin never looked so good.

His jowls are missing some wrinkles, his smirk is Mona Lisa sly and sexy, and he's sporting a Kirk Douglas dimple on his chin. At least that's how he appears on the dlrs 100 bill on Rumyan Chobanov's desk.

It's a fake, but few would notice. The engraving is crisp, the paper feels convincing to the touch, and the note sports enough watermarks and other security features to pass for the real thing at a grocery store in Detroit or Des Moines.

"It's really not that well-made, but an American citizen would probably accept such a bank note," said Chobanov, chief teller at Bulgaria's central bank and an expert on counterfeiting.

In this knockoff republic - a Balkan bargain basement where you can sniff out a dlrs 150 bottle of Chanel No. 5 for dlrs 35 or snag a pirate copy of Eminem' s latest CD for dlrs 3.50 - bogus bills have become Bulgaria's claim to fame.

Now that the European Union's common currency is in circulation, shadowy counterfeiters who've managed to stay one step ahead of technology and the law have added 100-euro notes to their bag of tricks.

Interpol and the Secret Service contend the dlrs 100 notes rival those that roll off the presses at the U.S. Treasury.

Bulgarian officials deny the bills are anywhere near flawless, but concede they're good enough to fool ultraviolet light detectors, protection pens and other devices - and swindle tens of thousands of unsuspecting consumers worldwide.

"We cannot take off our gloves," said Col. Rumen Milanov, who heads Bulgaria's National Service for Combating Organized Crime. "It's a very closed and secretive society. These criminals are highly skilled and practically invisible."

Police recently raided several clandestine counterfeiting operations in Sofia and in the Black Sea resort town of Varna, arresting 18 suspects and seizing computers, printing presses and more than dlrs 1.4 million in bogus U.S. and euro bills.

But despite the launch of a new anti-crime task force and the largest crackdown on organized crime since Bulgaria shook off communism in 1989, dozens of counterfeiters are eluding authorities preoccupied with drug traffickers and human smugglers - and with policing their own ranks. Over the past few weeks, 140 officers have been fired for alleged involvement in crime, the Interior Ministry says.

Experts say Bulgarian bill-makers work from remote garages and barns to churn out notes of varying quality, using everything from sophisticated high-pressure presses to household PCs, photo copiers, laser printers and simple fountain pens.

"There are a lot of Bulgarians doing this," said Ivan Bakalov, a free-lance journalist who has written extensively about counterfeiting.

"There's a significant amount of counterfeit money produced here, but it's of relatively low quality," he said. "The equipment needed to make the very best forgeries is almost impossible to obtain. It's easier to get a nuclear weapon than this kind of machine."

That hasn't stopped the fake bills from circulating worldwide.

In August, Greek authorities seized more than dlrs 200,000 in made-in-Bulgaria dlrs 100s. Earlier this year, Wisconsin police arrested a Bulgarian exchange student for allegedly circulating bogus dlrs 100s, and a Bulgarian-born Canadian pleaded guilty to possessing fakes in Maryland in 1999.

The Bulgarians themselves, who've been exposed to funny money ever since bogus coins bearing Alexander the Great's likeness first jingled in the pockets of tunics, are the least likely to be swindled.

Shopkeepers and ordinary citizens, operating in a cash society where credit cards still are not widely used, seem to know instinctively when they've been handed a fake.

"I touch them and feel that something's wrong," said Dora Vidanova, who changes money from a kiosk on one of Sofia's bustling boulevards.

This in a poor country where the ink from an acquaintance's crudely printed business card is apt to rub off on your palm, and where people joke that Bulgarian children are beautiful "because they're the only things we don't make with our hands."

Although Bulgaria is considered a major counterfeiting center, it's not the only country churning out forgeries.

High-quality fakes long have come out of the Arab world, and Colombia, where counterfeiters have perfected a unique technique - bleaching dlrs 1 bills and reprinting them as dlrs 100s - also has emerged as a major player.

But the Bulgarians' ambitious expansion into euro notes has raised the stakes in the war on counterfeiting.

"The dollar is still world money, and that's why the largest producers have focused on it for so long," said Bakalov, the journalist. "Now that the euro is the second-biggest world currency, they'll be concentrating on those more and more."

Milanov, whose investigators work closely with the Secret Service, said the U.S. agency's database is stuffed with examples of Bulgarian knockoff notes.

"We have our informants, but it's not easy to infiltrate these gangs," he said. "Our challenge is to catch them in the act."