Even if the money and institutions that manage our payments are secure, there may be other risks linked to our payments and means of payment.

For example, cash is at risk of being counterfeited or stolen. As regards counterfeiting, the new Swedish banknotes have a very high level of security and are difficult to counterfeit. In 2018, a total of 453 counterfeit banknotes were discovered in Sweden, which is a decrease of about 16 per cent from 2016, when 537 were discovered. A common way of comparing the number of counterfeit banknotes across different countries is to specify how many counterfeit banknotes were found in circulation in one year in relation to how many million banknotes are in circulation in each country. Sweden and the Scandinavian countries have a rate of two to three counterfeit banknotes per million banknotes in circulation, and this figure has not changed in a long time. In an international perspective, these are very low figures. Small currencies, like the Scandinavian ones, usually have few counterfeits in comparison with the larger economies, such as the United States, the euro area and China.