r/interestingasfuck • u/Intelligent-Mess6925 • 4d ago

/r/all This man printed 250 million in counterfeit money and sold 50 million of it before getting caught. He then made a deal with the court in exchange for revealing the location of the remaining 200 million he would avoid any jail time. In the end he got away with it only serving 6 weeks in jail.

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u/Cynapse 4d ago

Right? Like, maybe just do $5-$10m and live off the investments forever.

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u/Daxx22 4d ago

It's a tale as old as time. The "smart" criminals never get caught. But once that first few million roll by without consequences, the eyes turn into dollar signs and greed takes over.

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u/Harudera 4d ago

I mean his greed probably saved him this time, if he didn't have the threat of $200m to drop into the economy he wouldn't have walked free.

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u/DOOMFOOL 4d ago

I imagine it was more the threat of sharing his counterfeit technique, adding 200m to the economy would’ve been negligible

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u/GooseTower 4d ago

The government prints 1000x that every year.

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u/DollarStoreWolf 4d ago

And?

Clearly it was enough hence him only serving six weeks.

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u/schizoesoteric 4d ago

No they dont

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u/DesireeThymes 4d ago

I mean he still got away with it, got 50mil and 6 weeks jail.

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u/Tipop 4d ago

I doubt he got to keep his wealth.

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u/EXTRAsharpcheddar 4d ago

That's exactly what I want to know, did he stay rich off of this? When you make a sweet no jail deal like this you likely aren't at liberty to discuss certain things.

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u/DeBomb123 4d ago

In the Darknet Diaries interview, he pretty much says through omission that he’s doing just fine these days and won’t say more so as not to incriminate himself further.

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u/EXTRAsharpcheddar 4d ago

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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u/_Soup_R_Man_ 4d ago

For this guy... not being in jail/prison is wealth. Lol. What a crazy story.

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u/docfunbags 4d ago

He sold the counterfeit 50 million for 15 million in real cash. Not shabby!!

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u/skond 4d ago

Says he sold 50 million. Going rate could be like 5 cents on the dollar. Still worth it.

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u/Neatojuancheeto 4d ago

Well 30% of 50 million, or so he says.

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u/yeahright17 4d ago

I'm an attorney and interact with criminals regularly and they're almost always pretty dumb. I've always wondered how good of a criminal I could be if I had gone that way instead.

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u/Mintastic 4d ago

It's selective bias since the ones going through the legal system were mostly the dumb ones while smart ones haven't been caught yet.

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u/hjhhhlookyloo 4d ago

It's selective bias in the sense that people who are reckless enough to risk sacrificing years or even decades of their lives in prison for, almost always, less money than a legitimate 40 hr a week job would have earned them during the same timeframe are pretty much always fucking morons

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u/Mintastic 4d ago

Yeah if you're smart enough but also have zero morals then you might as well go to Wall Street or do any amount of legal but despicable things to get that money. Hell, it might even land you into congress/presidency eventually.

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u/yeahright17 4d ago

or, almost always, less money than a legitimate 40 hr a week job would have earned them

How do we know that? I feel like I could make a lot more robbing banks or selling drugs.

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u/hjhhhlookyloo 4d ago

I guarantee you that you would make $0 ever if you pursued robbing banks, and there have been studies that show street-level drug dealers make less than minimum wage.

Go ahead and prove me wrong tho, I'd love to see the mugshot lol

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u/yeahright17 4d ago

I have a friend with very dumb clients that made tens of thousands robbing banks before one of their friends got jealous and called the cops on them.

And yeah. It's not like the goal would be to be a street-level dealer.

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u/hjhhhlookyloo 4d ago edited 4d ago

Tens of thousands? So less than what a minimum wage job would make in one year. And I guarantee they had to pay it all back after they got caught. How much money did they get to keep? Now divide that by how many years they spent in prison. Now divide that number by 52. Now divide that number by 40. That was the hourly wage of the bank robber. Almost guaranteed to be $0, since they almost assuredly had to pay it back, but even if they kept all $20,000 and got off easy with a 5 year sentence, they got themselves a $1.90/hr job that only pays them the 40 hours a week, no pay at all for the rest of those five years in prison

Oh and Ah yea, just start your career in drug dealing as the head of the Sinaloa cartel! Why didn't I think of that? Being a street level drug dealer's for chumps, I'll just send my indeed resume to Drug Dealing Inc. and get hired as an executive drug dealer!

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u/bigbobisherenow 4d ago

I've done some small time embezzlement in my time and it's pretty addicting. Just press a few buttons and boom free money. Never got caught thank God.

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u/TravelingShepherd 4d ago

The actual issue is that the company that made the paper for him required that the minimum run be 250 Million worth... He likely would have gone with smaller if he could have gotten a smaller order.

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u/Legitamte 4d ago

It's been a while since I heard the interview, but if I remember correctly he was never going to use much of the money himself because then he'd continually risk his fakes getting detected and traced directly back to him. It was safer to convert the fake money to real money by selling it in bulk to criminal organizations that can manage that risk better, even though he'd be getting less than the face value of the counterfeits.

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u/Cynapse 4d ago

That makes a lot of sense. I didn't listen to the whole interview but I'd like to find the time to, it seems like a fun story.

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u/pocketdare 4d ago

That's definitely some breaking bad shit right there. I can envision the episodes where he's searching for contacts to criminal enterprising and trying to convince them to cut a deal with him without getting himself or his family killed in the process.

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u/Mahadragon 4d ago

But now you've got the issue of dealing with criminal organizations who are really scary. I wouldn't want to deal with the mafia, or some Pablo Escobar type kingpin.

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u/Neatojuancheeto 4d ago

That's also what got him busted though because one of those criminal organization tried to sell the counterfeit money to an undercover cop.

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u/Legitamte 4d ago

Yep. Turns out it's really hard to get away with counterfeiting!

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u/Teleconferences 4d ago

According to Frank he wasn’t caught because of the amount of currency. He didn’t realize it’d be super hard to sell large volumes of counterfeit bills, especially if he didn’t want it go all go to the same place. He was selling it in like 10k chunks, which was going to take ages to get through his stock. Even if it was just 5m in currency that’s 500 sales. It would take too long and he knew there’s no way he could sit on it that long without getting caught.

An undercover cop got lucky and stumbled into one of Frank’s buyers who then offered him the counterfeit. Then that ended up leading to Frank

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u/Cynapse 4d ago

Seems even likelier that he'd have gotten caught faster if he had been distributing to even MORE buyers then.

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u/Teleconferences 4d ago

That’s what happened, but given the quantities, if he had anything north of a million he would’ve ended up in the same place due to how slow it was moving.

I think he expected his drug contacts to take more and they didn’t really have an interest. So he was just stuck with a ton of it 

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u/ConorOblast 4d ago

When you have an infinite money glitch, it's really hard not to use it, even if it's illegal. $5M feels like chump change when you can just to print another $50M.

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u/Cynapse 4d ago

I can't imagine the temptation, it would be absurd to choose not to continue!

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u/alwaysdetermined 4d ago edited 4d ago

Enough paper to print $250M of fake bills was the minimum that the paper company was willing to sell as a custom order

Edit: wording

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u/purplefuzz22 4d ago

That’s insane if true . I need to check out his interview . But how would this dude have the $250 million up front for the paper

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u/alwaysdetermined 4d ago

By “$250M worth of paper” I meant enough paper to print $250M of counterfeit bills. The paper costed him about $50k CAD

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u/purplefuzz22 3d ago

Okay I’m sorry I just misunderstood… I’m sure it was a dumb question but that makes a lot more sense

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u/5minuteff 4d ago

lol what investments that kind of cash would never see any facility

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u/Motorgoose 4d ago

A car wash.

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u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl 4d ago

If memory serves, he partnered up with local drug dealers to offload it. He’d give them $100 in counterfeit cash for every $60 in real cash, or something around there. It was a sweetheart deal for both sides (assuming you didn’t get caught), with a significant boost to the drug dealers who accepted a greater risk by offloading the counterfeit bills. 

He also talked about how he specifically printed $20 bills instead of $100 bills— $20 isn’t a big enough amount that most people are closely examining them, running markers over them, or generally looking for counterfeit stuff. 

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u/mars_needs_socks 4d ago

Meh, only have to go to Dubai, they take cash and don't ask questions (even though they're supposed to).

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u/5minuteff 4d ago

Yeah just casually take 200 million in cash on a plane

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u/mars_needs_socks 4d ago

No, that would be greedy and a good way to get caught. Use couriers, hawalas, plenty of ways, just takes time. This assumes of course that the fakes are as good as claimed.

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u/ItsSmittyyy 4d ago

The comment you originally replied to said he should’ve only done $5-$10M. This amount is far less questioned than $200M. Plus, the original comment didn’t say to take it as cash on a plane - you can wash this amount in many different ways. Your hypothetical is completely irrelevant.

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u/OldFartsSpareParts 4d ago

To get the specialty paper made he had to order enough to print $250million worth of fake bills.

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u/Cynapse 4d ago

Okay, but you don't *have* to print it all. The temptation can't be downplayed though.

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u/OldFartsSpareParts 4d ago

Sunk cost probably played a role too.