Counterfeit $10 Tesorería General del Estado notes
In October 1918 José Alvarez Garcia and his associates were accused of possessing $580 in counterfeit $10 Tesorería General notesAY, Fondo: Justicia, Sección: Tribunal Superior de Justicia, Serie Penal, vol. 110, exp. 26.
The interim Tesorero General, Carlos Castillo, reported that the fake notes did not have the ‘Gobierno de Yucatán’ watermark, were on ordinary paper and had been produced from plates made from photographs of the original and so less precise. Two of the notes (series D, numbered 0419074 and 1078491) were given to experts Armando Manzanilla and Marcos Ferráez, who noted the following differences.
| GENUINE | COUNTERFEIT |
| Different paper | |
| Smaller in size | |
| Engraved (por medio de grabado hecho en planas de papel) | Printed from a cliché (por medio de cliché, es decir, impreso con un solo cliché) |
| On the face the space separating the top of the vignette from the bottom is larger | smaller |
| llena con un adorna diez en cifras | Lacks any detail |
| Madero’s whole image is clear; for both the lines and shadows are well defined and perfectly noticeable to the naked eye, especially the eagle on the ribbon on Madero's chest | lines and shadows are blurry, due to the imperfection of the drawing and the ink that was used |
| All the letters of the inscriptions and the figures are completely different | |
| The border lines are clear, visible and perfectly straight and parallel | The lines are partially broken by curves that nake them irregular |
| Alvarado and Cintra’s signatures are perfectly legible | Almost illegible |
| On reverse | |
| Colour is different | |
| the shield is of a perfect drawing, for the eagle stands out clearly for the purity of its lines and shadows | hardly distinguishable because of the printing process used |
| The character of the serial numbers and printer’s imprint are different | |
| Colours of ink are good quality and fine | colours of Ink are different and ordinary (corrientes) |
| the procedure used was drawing and copying with photogravure to make the cliché, which served for the printing | |
| The red seal which says GOBIERNO DEL ESTADO DE YUCATÁN is applied with a stamping machine and steel plates, making a perfectly clear impresión in relief | The seal is printed, so not in relief, blurred and completely changed |
Armando Manzanilla was a 35-year-old photographer. His evidence was that the counterfeit notes had been made through photogravure and plain printing. The counterfeiters had made reproductions of the front and back, taking a negative from the front and two from the back, and a collodion wet plate would have been used.