> 10 years went by and the search for Mister 880 turned into the largest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in Secret Service history.
The article doesn't explain why the Secret Service made this their biggest case, and it doesn't make much sense to me. If the dollars were accepted by the general population, it would cause an infinitesimal increase in inflation of no consequence to others. And if shopkeepers wised up to the false dollars and rejected them, at worst he was defrauding the public by a few hundred dollars a year. In either eventuality, surely the Secret Service had more notorious counterfeiters to track down?
The state reserves some of the harshest punishments for counterfeiters, since large scale counterfeit operations is one of the few crimes that is an attack on the state itself.
The US secret service was originally created specifically to combat counterfeit money, it's no surprise that they would keep tracking this man for a decade.
This man is unusual because he did the tiniest amount of one the most severely punished crime.
I have two "counterfeiting" stories - both of which are humorous even though one involve the Secret Service.
The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was embarrassed but they both laughed together.
The second story which does involve the Secret Service is when my friend had a bunch of presents that he had wrapped and put in his front porch until was going to depart for a party. One of the presents was wrapped in a sheet of uncut dollar bills - which you could buy for that purpose.
A neppy neighbor saw it through the window and called the police who called the FBI who called the Secret Service who came knocking on his door to investigate. They were also embarrassed but I don't think they laughed. My friend told him he understands that they're just doing their job and that it's an important one.
I remember my friend coming home from his first year in college and telling me about how he passed a counterfeit $30 he'd found to a clueless clerk and they actually made the correct change. My wise-ass response was that that wasn't actually counterfeit, it was just fraud.
If it's being passed off as money, then someone thought it was. I don't think the Secret Service cares if it's an invalid denomination or has Bozo the Clown on the front. Probably not a high priority for them given the overall lack of believability, but the attempt is what counts.
I don't think that the parent comment is making the case it's not a crime, but rather that it's not specifically counterfeiting. There comment reads as playfully snarky to me, since, when discussing counterfeit currency, we almost always take counterfeit to mean "to make a fraudulent replica of".
The number of countries where life imprisonment is available possible sentence for counterfeiting seems to confirm it having some of the harshest punishments.
> number of countries where life imprisonment is available
All of those, I believe, have the death penalty for e.g. corporate fraud.
This is a bit of a nut job hypothesis. States don’t collapse because of private counterfeiting. It simply becomes an economic nuisance. The budget given to anti-counterfeiting in any country is generally a rounding error compared with other policing.
We have the benefit of hindsight. The Secret Service couldn’t know the true scale of the operation, how many fake bills were in circulation, and that they were only singles.
A small leak can sink a ship. The fake dollars weren't knowingly accepted.
If public confidence in the value of money is lost, we're all in big trouble.
The Secret Service was right to pursue the case zealously.
I think the public take a pretty pragmatic view on this and don't care as long as they are not losing money on it. A few years ago it was estimated that 3% or so of the 1 pound coins in the UK were fake (there is now a more secure coin type); AFAIK the quality was pretty good, so they weren't glaringly obvious, and it seems no-one really cared - if the supermarket or pub would accept it, then it's effectively money, right?
> if the supermarket or pub would accept it, then it's effectively money, right?
Only long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is. If one of you believes it's counterfeit and the other doesn't (whether it actually is or isn't!)... then it's not effectively money, no. For example, I don't know about you, but I sure as hell wouldn't knowingly pass off a counterfeit on the basis that the supermarket would accept it.
I think it depends... if everyone else was treating the counterfeits same as genuine coins, so you're continually getting a mix in change, and no-one is rejecting them when you pass them on, then I think most people would just do the same. If you are not going to get in trouble by spending one (assuming you even noticed in the first place - probably not), and can be pretty much 100% assured it'll be accepted, then it'd be a bit perverse to squint at every coin you handle.
Fiat currency has no inherent value - it's just a system of communal acceptance. If everyone accepts the fake coins then they ARE money. As you note, the system only breaks down if some people stop accepting it.
It'd be interesting if someone from the UK could chime in: Were you aware of all the fake pounds circulating (1 in 30!) ? Did you notice if you got one? Did you care?
> I think it depends... if everyone else was treating the counterfeits same as genuine coins, so you're continually getting a mix in change, and no-one is rejecting them when you pass them on, then I think most people would just do the same.
I think you're directly affirming this: it's fine as long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is.
£1 coins are a small proportion of the value of cash in circulation and cash is a small proportion of the money supply. Coins are easier to counterfeit than notes so even if other coins have similar rates of counterfeits its a small problem in context.
To set an example, as a deterrent to larger operations. If they go after even the smallest impact counterfeiters, it leaves no room for a plausible level at which an operation can safely run under, no matter how small.
That article had an unsatisfactory and anti-climatic ending. It ended right when the Secret Service arrested the counterfeiter, where a normal reader would expect more discussion of how the Secret Service found the man and how they questioned the man after the arrest.
Did you read all three parts? They laid the groundwork by alerting local police and store owners about the counterfeiter probably living in that area of Manhattan and got lucky because the neighbor's apartment caught fire and the building owner threw out some of his burned possessions, including the plates and some counterfeit bills.
> Juettner began working as a maintenance man and building superintendent in New York's Upper East Side. His job allowed him and his family to live rent free in the basement of the building where he worked.
Do they? I certainly don't - it's just a wad of notes. I'd probably notice if the one on top didn't have a "20" on it, and that's about it. When I spend it I'm also just looking to see if it has a "20" on it.
I hate speding dollars. All the bill sizes being g the same, and the colors similar. Too easy to make mistakes. I feel for the blind...how do they cope?
In the US, IIRC they have a trusted person sort the bills by denomination for them -- like a friend or a bank teller -- and then they fold them into different orientations so they know what they've handed to a checkout clerk. No way for them to prevent being shortchanged, unfortunately.
I really don't know. Even as a seeing person you need to have your wits about you, and I think most people sort notes by value in their wallet. Most other countries have notes whose size and color differs by value, so it's much harder to make mistakes.
My guess is that almost everyone was paying with cash, so a $1 bill was not uncommon.
I don't remember the last time I paid $20 in cash. [That's like AR$30K here in Argentina. For that ammount, we mostly use credit card, debit card or one of the apps with QR.]
Since they were silver certificates he could have redeemed them for a 26.73g coin composed of 90% silver and 10% copper. In 2026, the value of the silver has fluctuated between about $46 and $94 (and the value of the copper content has stayed a little over 3 cents).
Would owning his apartment disqualify him from being a folk hero? If he was a renter, does he deserve to be a hero? Just wondering. If he'd gotten rich from printing fake currency and become a right wing dictator would you think the same as if he was just a broke tenant? Why or why not?
I'm talking about the vague implications the parent poster was making - the purposes of which weren't very clear, but which I interpreted as: "A) Money is worth less than it was, (so printing fake money is justified) B) But on the other hand maybe he was part of the propertied class (in which case it wouldn't be)". I was asking whether they had a moral compass.
Maybe because it sounds like a question on a 10th grade exam. It’s demanding and didactic, both in framing the question and the form of the expected answer.
Fun fact: in parts of East Africa, a $50 bill may be worth about 60-70 $1 dollar bills, due to the $1 bill being easier to counterfeit (and also more likely worn down).
Very interesting. It's probably because fewer people take the time to counterfeit $50s, $10s or $2s than anything else. What about $100 bills? In Argentina, if you have an older $100 bill, no one will take it. And apparently there's a roaring trade in fake $20s in Costa Rica, which I only learned at a casino there recently when I took USD directly out of an ATM and had it inspected by a pit boss in the same establishment. It's ironic, because if I were someone with an interest in counterfeiting, I'd focus on forging Pesos or Colones or something no one looks at before I'd take a stab at USD.
In Tanzania specifically, the $100s were fine. The weird pricing seemed driven partly by perception. It was usually street vendors who would say $1 bills were worth 2000 shillings (~84 cents), while the larger banknotes were fine. Other vendors would charge X shillings or Y dollars, and when you did the calculation, it would be about 70 cents per dollar. I had crisp $1 bills and asked them why they discounted $1 bills so much? And some responded they were easy to counterfeit. There was also something about banks not taking pre-2009 (if I remember correctly) dollars, and sometimes they may not be bothered to check the dates.
But even at exchanges, the bid for $50s was beating the ask for $1s, I was thinking there's a trivial arbitrage opportunity haha.
I’ve had USD rejected both for being too new and for being too old in various corners of the earth - different cultures seem to want their currency differently aged.
Uncirculated notes feel weird and also tend to stick together. Thankfully, it doesn't take much handling for them to wear in enough to not stick.
I did have a food stand on the boardwalk in New Jersey once refuse a worn bill, which was wild. I think it was a $1 and it may have been slightly torn near a corner. I'd expect that if using USD outside the US, but I guess Jersey is different.
I gave a bonus tip to a tour guide in one of these countries.
I'd brought USD notes from Europe to spend and as an emergency fund. They were all brand new (sequential numbers) $50 notes, just what my bank gave me.
At the end of the trip, I swapped about $300 of old notes the tour staff had for $300 of new notes. This included a very slightly damaged $100 note which the tour guide said had been a tip, which he was unable to use because of the damage.
It's been a while since I've tried to change money but even as recently as 10 years ago, money changers in a lot of places wouldn't accept even slightly wrinkled bills or bills older than a specific series. Every time before a trip I'd have to go to the bank and ask the teller for notes with series > X and not wrinkled/showing signs of being folded.
It is more an artifact of being cut off from the US mint/banking system. For a domestic US bank they can swap any worn currency for new stuff for free.
So as US currency degrades over time it slightly loses inter exchangeability in the third world.
Nobody will accept a €500 note in Europe - not even banks - you have to get it changed at a central bank, and you can expect a lot of questions, like “what kind of drugs did you sell to get this?”
An easier option if you have one, is going to a forex office in Vietnam or somewhere - and even then they may not take it.
I was lumbered with a couple of them for a few years, until I dumped them in Uruguay.
German 50 Trillion (Marks) _stamps_ from 1923 are (literally) a-dime-a-dozen because postal services had a giant amount of them printed for issue in fall-1923 - just to have the whole lot rendered obsolete by the November currency reform. Unstamped/new they're not worth the paper they're printed on. Verifiably used / franked actually on a postal package they are much rarer. Fortune reversal - the worthless item becoming the collectible...
Under ordinary circumstances, a federal counterfeiting arrest would have generated little sympathy. But the story of Emerich Juettner struck the public imagination immediately. Here was an old man surviving in poverty by printing crude one-dollar bills one at a time. He was not violent, greedy, or glamorous.
At trial, Juettner admitted his activities openly. The judge sentenced him to only a year and a day in prison, and he was paroled after 4 months. He was also made to pay a fine of $1. It has been agreed that Juettner’s complete lack of greed was the rationale behind the light sentence. …
Juettner returned to a life of normalcy, and lived out the rest of his days in the suburbs of Long Island, where he died in 1955, at the age of 79.
After his release, Juettner briefly achieved celebrity status. His notoriety became so widespread that Hollywood adapted the story into the 1950 film Mister 880, directed by Edmund Goulding. Eventually, Juettner made more money from the release of Mister 880 than he had made by counterfeiting.
About 20 years ago there was a gang that made fake Brazilian R$1 coins (they must have been worth 50 US cents then, I don't recall precisely). And I have collected a couple of very shady R$0,50 coins that I'm pretty sure are fake. I collect commemorative coins so I always check my change carefully.
I don't think the materials are expensive, but the electricity required might be. So my guess is that this might make sense if someone steals the power. One guy was busted stealing electricity to mine bitcoin a few years ago.
This was pretty common with £1 coins until they moved to bimetallic coinage. The fakes would be rejected by vending machines.
The biggest tells were poor reeding quality and slightly soft detailing. On very low quality fakes, the face and obverse weren't aligned, though I never encountered one of these in the wild.
Back in the 2000s/10s I had a little jar of various £1 and a couple 50p I was certain were fake. Interestingly the fake £1 I got most frequently were -from- vending machines - I wonder if those refilling them slipped them in?
Sadly not sure where they are now, they were also mixed in with a good few £5 coins I bought, I used to love paying for things with a £5 coin. Hope I find them again!
> I wonder if those refilling them slipped them in?
I recall reading that they were smuggled into the country by organized crime. They'd then sell them for around 60p on the pound to coin heavy businesses (esp. laundry and vending.)
Really? Man that's a shame, you used to be able to 'buy' them at the post office for £5 - so I'd get at least £50worth a month and spend them around east London, I seemed to find it hilarious at the time - but after a quick chat I don't remember anyone refusing them anywhere.
Slightly off topic, Vladimir Nabakov wrote a beautiful, sad story about a guy like this -- a lonely counterfeiter that made a small number of individually crafted bills. It is called The Leonardo.
Is it possible that he might have spent almost $1 in materials and labor and allocated capital expenses on equipment ... to create each of these counterfeits.
Attempting this today would probably surely cost that much in today's dollars?
EDIT: on a second thought ..this almost feels like "proof of work" for currency :)
The U.S. government spends approximately 4.1 cents [1] to produce each $1 bill. It would probably be more expensive to counterfeit it because of the volume, but I doubt it would be more than $1.
If I hypothetically set out to create a single fake one dollar bill that can pass for real ... i would have to spend a lot more than one dollar on the materials ro pull it off, surely?
Granted, a nickel was worth more in the 1930s...but not that much more.
It's illegal to own these counterfeit nickels because it's illegal to own any counterfeit currency, but they pop up from time to time in collector circles. I don't think the Secret Service cares at this point.
This was an interesting read. I am somewhat reminded of J. S. G. Boggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs), who used to hand draw banknotes and bills as a performance art of sort.
There is an excellent book about him by Lawrence Weschler called _Boggs: A Comedy of Values_.
Slightly off-topic, but the first time I saw a (real) 2-dollar bill, I almost called the Secret Service on a customer. Was then educated about the legality of 2-dollar bills.
Old family story: Back in the 1920's and 1930's, one of my cousins (a bit removed) was a poacher in rural northern Michigan. Everyone from the County Sheriff on down knew that she was a poacher. Everyone also knew that she was a widow with several children, living in (even for the place and time) grim poverty, and the she was poaching to feed her children.
As kids, we were told more details - both to know about our extended family, and to support various lessons about poverty and charity and pre-WWII rural communities.
But one of the more subtle lessons was that "the law" and society's actual rules are, at best, overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. No matter what lawmakers, those invested in the legal system, and those telling simplistic stories to children might say.
The Frank Bourassa story is pretty incredible. There’s a TV series but I recommend listening to his interviews. I think NPR has one that is pretty good. The level of planning, logistics and craft the guy put into his illegal money printing shop is admirable. Extremely intelligent and driven person. He could have succeeded in any other legal business if wanted to, but looks like it would not be the same thrill for him. His counterfeit US bills were so good that allegedly some of it is still in circulation with silent approval of the US government.
It's ok for the govt to print as many notes as is needed to satisfy the govt's needs needs but it is not ok for the common Joe to do the same. One is labeled as inflation or quantitative easing and the other is labeled a crime
Money is actually generated by changing the interest on, and selling, bonds.
Various governments can, and many have, done what you describe, but banking in this day & age is about moving digits in a register, not shipping truckloads of $100-bills.
> The 70-year-old retiree who became America’s worst counterfeiter. [link]
He evaded capture for 10 years, making him one of the best. Also got less than a slap on his wrist and ended up making legal money on the whole ordeal.
In short, there are a great many US 100s out there that are so good that experts are required to spot them. The companies that sell/service the equipment necessary to print these only deal with national governments. So all eyes are on north korea.
These days it is much more effective to pay employees to swap payment terminals (or just employees doing it themselves), changing where the money ends up, and banks don't really know what to do about it.
Accusing someone of using AI is a pretty bad thing to do. It's even worse when it's qualified by "perhaps". If you have something meaningful to say, try responding to the meat of the comment, not to who or what authored it.
The article doesn't explain why the Secret Service made this their biggest case, and it doesn't make much sense to me. If the dollars were accepted by the general population, it would cause an infinitesimal increase in inflation of no consequence to others. And if shopkeepers wised up to the false dollars and rejected them, at worst he was defrauding the public by a few hundred dollars a year. In either eventuality, surely the Secret Service had more notorious counterfeiters to track down?
The US secret service was originally created specifically to combat counterfeit money, it's no surprise that they would keep tracking this man for a decade.
This man is unusual because he did the tiniest amount of one the most severely punished crime.
The first was in college. A buddy of mine scribbled a facsimile of a $20 onto a piece of paper with a green marker. He then handed it to the checkout clerk at the cafeteria who took it and started to hand them back change. He stopped her and said "no, no it's a joke - look at what I just handed you". She was embarrassed but they both laughed together.
The second story which does involve the Secret Service is when my friend had a bunch of presents that he had wrapped and put in his front porch until was going to depart for a party. One of the presents was wrapped in a sheet of uncut dollar bills - which you could buy for that purpose.
A neppy neighbor saw it through the window and called the police who called the FBI who called the Secret Service who came knocking on his door to investigate. They were also embarrassed but I don't think they laughed. My friend told him he understands that they're just doing their job and that it's an important one.
I remember my friend coming home from his first year in college and telling me about how he passed a counterfeit $30 he'd found to a clueless clerk and they actually made the correct change. My wise-ass response was that that wasn't actually counterfeit, it was just fraud.
It's still fraud, and an attempt to deceive.
Which we have.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Nebby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard
This is empirically untrue [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money#Penalties_by...
All of those, I believe, have the death penalty for e.g. corporate fraud.
This is a bit of a nut job hypothesis. States don’t collapse because of private counterfeiting. It simply becomes an economic nuisance. The budget given to anti-counterfeiting in any country is generally a rounding error compared with other policing.
If somebody beats someone else up, to teach him a lesson - this is also a direct attack on the state itself, the monopoly on violence.
But "large scale"? This old man with his crude tools and bad 1 dollar notes?
"The press adored him and the public sympathized with him. "
That is probably the bit, that got them engaged. Cannot have this set as an example that works out for someone.
not quite, the state monopolises _legitimate_ violence. it delegitimises the violence of individuals by making assault etc illegal.
Only long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is. If one of you believes it's counterfeit and the other doesn't (whether it actually is or isn't!)... then it's not effectively money, no. For example, I don't know about you, but I sure as hell wouldn't knowingly pass off a counterfeit on the basis that the supermarket would accept it.
Fiat currency has no inherent value - it's just a system of communal acceptance. If everyone accepts the fake coins then they ARE money. As you note, the system only breaks down if some people stop accepting it.
It'd be interesting if someone from the UK could chime in: Were you aware of all the fake pounds circulating (1 in 30!) ? Did you notice if you got one? Did you care?
I think you're directly affirming this: it's fine as long as you both accept the same shared understanding of what it is.
That would depend on how many counterfeit dollars were out there, which the authorities did not know at that point of the investigation
He started in 1938 and was arrested in 1948:
Enough to buy some supplies, but how did he pay the rent? Perhaps he owned his apartment.https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1948?amount=1
On my first read I thought he had become a junk collector out of depression for the death of his wife.
I don't remember the last time I paid $20 in cash. [That's like AR$30K here in Argentina. For that ammount, we mostly use credit card, debit card or one of the apps with QR.]
But even at exchanges, the bid for $50s was beating the ask for $1s, I was thinking there's a trivial arbitrage opportunity haha.
I did have a food stand on the boardwalk in New Jersey once refuse a worn bill, which was wild. I think it was a $1 and it may have been slightly torn near a corner. I'd expect that if using USD outside the US, but I guess Jersey is different.
I'd brought USD notes from Europe to spend and as an emergency fund. They were all brand new (sequential numbers) $50 notes, just what my bank gave me.
At the end of the trip, I swapped about $300 of old notes the tour staff had for $300 of new notes. This included a very slightly damaged $100 note which the tour guide said had been a tip, which he was unable to use because of the damage.
So as US currency degrades over time it slightly loses inter exchangeability in the third world.
An easier option if you have one, is going to a forex office in Vietnam or somewhere - and even then they may not take it.
I was lumbered with a couple of them for a few years, until I dumped them in Uruguay.
example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L3536O2
In other words, Africa is a big place. Just say "Zimbabwe".
I wonder if the cashier checked the bill closely when he paid it.
I don't think the materials are expensive, but the electricity required might be. So my guess is that this might make sense if someone steals the power. One guy was busted stealing electricity to mine bitcoin a few years ago.
OTOH, maybe they just do it for fun.
The biggest tells were poor reeding quality and slightly soft detailing. On very low quality fakes, the face and obverse weren't aligned, though I never encountered one of these in the wild.
Sadly not sure where they are now, they were also mixed in with a good few £5 coins I bought, I used to love paying for things with a £5 coin. Hope I find them again!
I recall reading that they were smuggled into the country by organized crime. They'd then sell them for around 60p on the pound to coin heavy businesses (esp. laundry and vending.)
Attempting this today would probably surely cost that much in today's dollars?
EDIT: on a second thought ..this almost feels like "proof of work" for currency :)
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm
If I hypothetically set out to create a single fake one dollar bill that can pass for real ... i would have to spend a lot more than one dollar on the materials ro pull it off, surely?
https://coinweek.com/a-collectible-counterfeit-the-story-of-...
Granted, a nickel was worth more in the 1930s...but not that much more.
It's illegal to own these counterfeit nickels because it's illegal to own any counterfeit currency, but they pop up from time to time in collector circles. I don't think the Secret Service cares at this point.
There is an excellent book about him by Lawrence Weschler called _Boggs: A Comedy of Values_.
The 2025 movie is worth watching https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35495035/
I'm guessing this was before the law where you couldn't benefit from crimes?
I see what they did there.
At least this story shows that the lack of greed didn't improve quality.
Ignorance is not a rare trait.
As kids, we were told more details - both to know about our extended family, and to support various lessons about poverty and charity and pre-WWII rural communities.
But one of the more subtle lessons was that "the law" and society's actual rules are, at best, overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. No matter what lawmakers, those invested in the legal system, and those telling simplistic stories to children might say.
It's ok for the govt to print as many notes as is needed to satisfy the govt's needs needs but it is not ok for the common Joe to do the same. One is labeled as inflation or quantitative easing and the other is labeled a crime
Money is actually generated by changing the interest on, and selling, bonds.
Various governments can, and many have, done what you describe, but banking in this day & age is about moving digits in a register, not shipping truckloads of $100-bills.
> The 70-year-old retiree who became America’s worst counterfeiter. [link]
He evaded capture for 10 years, making him one of the best. Also got less than a slap on his wrist and ended up making legal money on the whole ordeal.
Whatever legal business we are in otherwise, apparently it's the wrong one
In short, there are a great many US 100s out there that are so good that experts are required to spot them. The companies that sell/service the equipment necessary to print these only deal with national governments. So all eyes are on north korea.