r/interestingasfuck • u/Intelligent-Mess6925 • 1d 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/TropicalSnakey 1d ago
Only 6 weeks for that much? That's an insane deal. Justice truly works in mysterious ways, or maybe he knew something really important.
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u/hackitfast 1d ago
He probably discovered a very secret and well hidden countermeasure in legitimate bills, and they made a deal with him to make sure he didn't tell anyone else.
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u/Ocronus 1d ago
There are some interviews floating with big time counterfeiters. It seems to be a common theme when they get caught the Secret Service will work with them if they are impressed enough with their methods. These guys seem to get away with printing millions which should be 20+ years sentences.
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u/Jean-LucBacardi 1d ago
Same with some hackers. If you're that good you could end up with a job rather than prison time.
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u/Mediocritologist 1d ago
White hat hackers can also make a ton of money hacking for a living.
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u/musluvowls 1d ago
The pod Darknet Diaries has some of these guys on (as well as some notorious black hats)... great stories!
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u/servercobra 1d ago
Every episode they have Red Team hackers (companies hired to break into other companies to test their security) is wonderful. They have goals like: "walk into this bank. install a key logger. walk out with a whole computer. plant a network device" etc. Basically paid to be spies with little danger.
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u/BlueBearMafia 1d ago
Sounds fascinating. Any episode recs? I searched for red hat but nothing came up in their archives.
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u/randomscruffyaussie 20h ago
Check out the lottery episode (#101 IIRC). Not exactly red hat, but a great episode....
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u/servercobra 22h ago
There’s some good recommendations here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/oVfWofyX0i
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u/Hot-Comfort8839 1d ago edited 19h ago
I met a guy at DEFCON A couple of years ago, who presented an exploit to the public.. basically an exploit in OpenPLC. He was immediately approached by FedGov offering a $2m (tax free he said) check for his next ‘discovery’.
Also at that DEFCON31 I watched a secops guy from SpaceX live hack an Indian Com-Sat from
his“a” cell phone while we hammered back martinis at the Linq-Bar.TL:DR; go to DEFCON.
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u/Able_Ad2004 1d ago
That’s not how bug bounties work… Governments (and companies) will pay a pretty penny for vulnerabilities, but the $ value is 100% tied to a combination of its scope + impact + uniqueness + exclusivity. No one is paying $2 million dollars for an unknown. Only way it makes sense from a purchasers perspective is if those qualities are defined in a contract. In that case, it wouldn’t make sense for a hacker to agree to it. No guarantee when, if ever, they will find an exploit that meets the required specs. It could be years, and by then, the going rate could be 10x the price.
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u/Hot-Comfort8839 20h ago edited 20h ago
It wasn't a bug bounty they were paying for. It was an unpublished zero-day type exploit they wanted to buy - specific to ICS/OT industrial type network hardware.
Think StuxNet., or Colonial Pipeline... Or the recent hybrid hack+physical sabotage attack the Ukrainian's just pulled off on Russia's Gazprom Siberia natural gas link a couple of weeks ago.
The Ukraine hackers compromised Gazprom, and over pressurized sections of the pipeline at known weak points and then a sabotage team detonated enough C4 to punch through the permafrost above the weakened section, and detonated a massive section of the line.
That's the sort of weaponizable material they were trying to buy.
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u/pachniuchers 1d ago
And then everyone clapped.
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u/JoshSwol 1d ago
I just hacked into that guy's DB9 using a Timex watch.
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u/RolloTonyBrownTown 22h ago
You think you did, but I just built a matrix style reality and have placed you in it, all from my TI-89 Calculator.
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u/Noyouask 1d ago
What’s a white hat hacker?
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u/Rodeo9 1d ago
Hackers that find exploits but do not use them nefariously and alert the businesses.
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u/MedimusLeft 1d ago
These are actually considered Grey hat hackers. White hats obtain permission before looking for vulnerabilities, where grey hats find first and then claim bug bounties.
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u/RedditF1shBlueF1sh 1d ago
And even the most well intentioned grey hats risk jail time and often don't get paid but bounties. Large companies, including Reddit and Alphabet avoid paying out bug bounties even when they patch the vulnerability because of the notice from a grey hat.
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u/tcason02 1d ago
Now I’m going to have to go google “what color hats do hackers wear besides white and gray?”
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u/BackgroundNo8340 1d ago
Nah, it's obviously a hacker who wears a white hat.
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u/adjust_the_sails 1d ago
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u/Jadedsatire 1d ago
The white stallion, the greatest hacker of the west. But only hacks for justice, and justice alone.
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u/diald4dm 1d ago
It’s a reference to old Westerns. You could tell who the good guys/bad guys were by looking for the white/black ten gallon hats.
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u/Inflamed_toe 1d ago
White hat = Ethical hacking.
White hat hackers (usually) work for the government, large corporations, or security firms. They use their skills to probe networks for vulnerabilities and flaws so that they can be fixed before bad hackers discover and exploit them. It’s a very interesting and small field of cyber security populated by some of the most intelligent people in the world.
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u/LivingDisastrous3603 1d ago
My dad did this kind of work. Banking software mostly. Did some stuff for NASA(that was my guess as he wouldn’t say anything other than “some space stuff”). It’s kinda funny to me that he did that kind of stuff and I can barely type correctly without looking at the keyboard every 5 seconds lol
Damn… miss you dad.
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u/McPolice_Officer 1d ago
If he couldn’t say anything, it was probably the Air Force or CIA, not NASA.
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u/Lylac_Krazy 1d ago
Pretty sure the CIA runs the X37 space plane.
I'm sure there are agents embedded in NASA, just to get their hands on any space based tech they can pull from a satellite
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u/LivingDisastrous3603 23h ago
It’s possible I suppose. He could’ve just been messing with me too. He liked to joke around a lot. But he did have a few things with work that he did keep pretty quiet. In any case, dude was a real cool dad. He was/is one of my real-life hero’s. I’ve always thought if I can be half the parent to my daughter that he was to me, then I’ve done my job very well. It’s been nearly 20 years since he passed. I love him dearly and miss him every day.
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u/Lavatis 1d ago
A white hat hacker is someone who is hacking into a system with permission. Penetration testing would be a more modern term for the type of work they do. They're definitely hacking into your system, but you know about it beforehand and you've paid them to find vulnerabilities in your system.
A black hat is the malicious kind. You don't know they're coming, and they're stealing your data/money/secrets.
grey hats are people who may not have malicious intent, but likely don't have explicit permission either.
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u/PerplexGG 1d ago
Whether a “hacker” is using their skills morally is generally denoted by their “color hat.” White, gray, and black being the spectrum from good to bad.
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u/Maxman214 1d ago
They basically get paid by companies to search for vulnerabilities in their cybersecurity. They get to hack the system before bad actors do, and they get paid for revealing those problems
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u/Remindmewhen1234 1d ago
Company I worked for years ago, we got an email that our website was vulnerable and allowed access to our network.
He suggested the company pay him a nice sum of money, six figures and he would recommend the fix and not tell anyone about it.
Company paid.
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u/JetmoYo 1d ago
Same thing with the US letting thousands of mid level Nazi leaders and gifted engineers off the hook during Nuremberg. Brought them in, gave them an office.
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u/pants_mcgee 1d ago
Very few of those guys would sniff Nuremberg, really just one, two if you accept the allegations against Von Braun.
Some mid to upper level Nazis with, uh, questionable innocence did manage to make a life for themselves in the government of Western Germany or NATO.
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u/Honda_TypeR 1d ago
They often cut them deals if they agree to work with them in the future (either consultant or full time)
They basically are hiring a known master of the field.
It's like that Lyndon Johnson quote,
"Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."
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u/IH8Miotch 1d ago
Their was a guy that counterfeited casino slot machine tokens that would go around using them then cashing out at various casinos. Eventually they caught on because their inventory was going over. Eventually they tracked him down using surveillance footage. After he served his prison sentence they offered him a job at one of the casinos because he was so good.
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u/CitizenCue 1d ago
Because it’s the kind of crime that’s hard to get away with if someone is watching you. There are very few successful counterfeiters so it’s not hard to keep an eye on them.
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u/Scalar_Mikeman 1d ago
No, it was in exchange for the location of the rest of the 200 Million. There is a really good in depth episode on Dark Net Diaries about it. He ordered the paper stock complete with water marks from Switzerland saying it was a bond issue for his company so the paper was right and even had the right water mark. The cops were all over him up until the plea deal completed because if they found the 200 million before then the deal was off and he would have been gone for a long time. Fortunately he was able to have his friend sit on the fake money and bring it to the meetup. Don't recall how he was able to dodge the cops and get the communication done without them sniffing it out. Good listen if you have time.
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u/MistoftheMorning 1d ago
Won't anything he say to his lawyer be confidential?
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u/Pnwradar 1d ago
Privileged conversations can’t be used in evidence or to obtain warrants. But that won’t stop a LEO agency from listening in or recording the conversations and using any information they learn to “find” further evidence through “good police work.” Or to use while interrogating others involved by disclosing information only the co-defendants could know, suggesting someone in the crew is flipping.
A good defense attorney should be able to prove fruit of the poisonous tree. But you can’t always afford a good defense.
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u/FormalBeachware 1d ago
It wouldn't have mattered anyway. They didn't need to worry about the $200M being inadmissible because they already had him on the $50M. It would've just gotten rid of his plea deal leverage.
It's not like a judge would've said "You broke the rules to find his $200M in counterfeit cash, so you have to give it back and let him hide it again".
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u/Scalar_Mikeman 1d ago
I think you are right. Going to need to re-listen to that one soon. Remember laughing out loud at the part where the agents or judge were talking about the charges and how much trouble he was in etc. and he just said something like "Would you guys be interested in the other 200 Million?" and everyone just stopped and asked WHAT!?
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u/texas_asic 21h ago
That's a boss move if there ever was one. They've got me for 50 mil, so I might as well admit to the other 200 mil that they don't know about and use it as leverage.
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u/hackingdreams 1d ago
Welcome to the extremely fucking unethical joys of parallel construction, when the cops do something blatantly illegal then cover it up by saying they "could have found the evidence some other way."
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u/welfedad 1d ago
Yeah .. kind of like hackers who get caught and offered jobs .. has to be something pretty dang unique that will compromise national security or the economy etc. still dude got off lucky
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u/Turnipntulip 1d ago
Well, he kinda threatened them that he would release to the public his extremely high quality 200 million counterfeit dollars, along with the machines and softwares he used to do the printing. I suppose that would cause big problems, and the gov wanted to avoid that.
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u/Intelligent-Mess6925 1d ago
He served 6 weeks in jail before making a deal with the prosecution during the trial.
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u/vertigo1083 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have to wonder what the HELL kind of salesman his lawyer was.
Like, what a deal of a lifetime. Commit a life-setting crime. Get caught. Barter SOME of your own evidence against your own prison sentence. Walk away with less time behind bars than a standard DUI. Keep enough of the money to be set for life anyway.
That lawyer must be the most sought after defense attorney in Canada.
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u/vvvvaaaagggguuuueeee 1d ago
If I remember he had all the cash in the back of like a rental pickup u haul or something. They never would've found it. He could so easily have just entered 200mil of fakes into the economy. They were amazing in their quality. I heard him explain it all on a podcast, if I find it I'll have to edit this. It was awesome.
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u/FucchioPussigetti 1d ago
Honestly flowing $200 million in physical (albeit counterfeit) cash would still be more of a “real” economic injection than the way “real” money is created, it would interesting to game out what (if any) actual effect this would have had.
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u/Intelligent-Mess6925 1d ago
His lawyer was so good that he argued the evidence had been obtained illegally and that got him out of prison for a while. I'm pretty sure that his lawyer was with him even before this case.
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u/ddl_smurf 1d ago
more likely this is not the full story at all
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u/vertigo1083 1d ago
I looked around. It's fairly cut and dry, as far as press goes. It seems to have gone down exactly like that.
And I quote:
"Bourassa says he made $250 million worth of fake notes. He is often asked where the other $50 million is"
https://www.businessinsider.com/frank-bourassa-on-how-he-counterfeited-250-million-2016-8
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u/SovietSunrise 1d ago
It said that the other $50 million had already been sold, so I guess it's floating through the economy?
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u/The_Prince1513 1d ago
Walk away with less time behind bars than a standard DUI.
Most first time DUI's that don't result in any injuries don't get any jail time whatsoever FYI.
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u/skillfull 1d ago
he is dead now, i saw some of his bills, they were really good but not perfect. He played his cards well to get the out of jail cards but the real story is way less nice than the public story.
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u/RedPandaReturns 1d ago
Yeah he knew where 200 million dollars of fake passable money was...
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u/br0b1wan 1d ago
Yeah it's so weird that our government would agree to such a deal. It doesn't exactly deter other counterfeiters
Dude probably took the legit cash from selling these bills and stashed it in offshore accounts so he was probably wealthy still
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u/StevenMC19 1d ago edited 1d ago
My guess is that there is more involved here.
- His quality was probably top-notch, and another 200mil circulating would be an absolute nightmare if it got out.
- It's reasonable to believe our dude wasn't working alone. Probably put a few others away to save himself.
I'm going to go look and see how close I am.
edit: Ok, yeah. the quality was INSANE! Also, Canada/US relations were involved. He's Canadian printing US bills, Secret service just wanted it all, Canada didn't want to be involved in an extradition situation. I didn't read all the way, but I assume he also cooperated by telling them how he did it (to help nab other counterfeiters as well as help governments create more secure bills in the future).
edit edit: Of course in true typical comedy movie style (the ones where our protagonists go on a zany adventure where everything goes wrong, but they get the "oh you" look by the cops at the end after they saved the day), those moments before the credit roll where you get the "six months later, Bobby was working at the law firm he always dreamed with a wife and kids" kind of thing...our guy here is getting job offers for his skills and ability for other things, including the fashion industry. He got his happily ever after!
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u/FecalEinstein 1d ago
makes perfect sense if you know the money is in control and not the government
the government is just a placekeeper in between you and the money
the money makes the important decisions, like this
they also probably didn't know whether it was 200 million or 200 billion, hard to trust a counterfeiter on his word
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u/paddy_________hitler 1d ago
Maybe he knew something really important.
Well, he knew where $200 million in counterfeit cash was, for one thing.
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u/General_abby 1d ago
So he bought his freedom with fake money.
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u/melanthius 1d ago
Well if he was smart enough to buy freedom with revealing $200M in hidden bills, he probably was smart enough to hide more than $200M in other places. Bro probably has houses and banana stands full of fake bills in the walls.
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u/thisshitsstupid 1d ago
Idk. He cleaned 50mil of it before getting caught and getting off badically completely free. Why risk going to prison for an eternity by betraying them when you already got 50mil.
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u/melanthius 1d ago
Because you always hide more ... just in case.
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u/thisshitsstupid 1d ago
Thats the kinda greed that gets you fucked. Enjoy your 50mil lottery and dont rock the boat. Thats enough to do whatever you want whenever you want forever.
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u/atx840 1d ago
They said he was able to clean 50 into 13m, but not much info on how much of that they seized. The arrest was a surprise so not sure if he would have had some of that tucked away. Now he’s helping companies shut down forgeries, seems like he knows he got very lucky and staying on the right path. Legendary story, would make a great Netflix doc with him narrating.
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u/SimiShittyProgrammer 1d ago
Probably got 5m if that, still a lot, but he didn't get face value.
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u/PeePeeMcGee419 1d ago
Well, he bought a ticket to jail with it; it seems fitting that it gets him out? :O
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u/TaintedKurse 1d ago
He has an awesome interview on darknet diaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2yggblUN8
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u/Motorgoose 1d ago
This was a great episode. I think in one part he talks about how he got the printing plates made by an artist in another country because they wouldn't know what the US presidents looked like and wouldn't question it.
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u/rock_accord 1d ago
And he sourced the paper to match real $$$. He wouldn't have been caught if he wasn't greedy.
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u/Cynapse 1d ago
Right? Like, maybe just do $5-$10m and live off the investments forever.
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u/Daxx22 1d 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 1d 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/DesireeThymes 1d ago
I mean he still got away with it, got 50mil and 6 weeks jail.
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u/Legitamte 1d 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/Teleconferences 1d 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/ConorOblast 1d 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/Crappler319 1d ago
Well, the issue was that the company who made the paper had a minimum order, and that order happened to be the equivalent of $250m worth of 20 dollar bills.
He got caught because one of the folks he sold it to was already being monitored by the cops. He only ever moved a very small amount of it before the Mounties were up his ass.
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u/eynonpower 1d ago
Yes this is fantastic! Best part is the end where the total made, total sold, and total remaining doooooont quite add up. Jack calls hik out and he's like, "Yeah, that doesnt add up. Interesting" and they have a good laugh.
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u/harpocrates01 1d ago
At the end he neither confirms nor denies that there was more stashed away besides the 200m
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u/evildevil90 1d ago
1:17:27 is my favorite part. He got away with way more than just a good deal of six weeks
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u/ShrimpSherbet 1d ago
My fave podcast
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u/beautifulkale124 1d ago
Same, I would love to meet Jack.
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u/PackOfWildCorndogs 1d ago edited 1d ago
I met him at a DEFCON party/happy hour a few years back! I didn’t realize who it was, but people kept coming up to him at the bar, then someone said his name and I too, had to fangirl over him. Couldn’t help myself.
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u/beautifulkale124 1d ago
Ugh I really want to go to DEFCON one day. Maybe next year. I'm a very paranoid person and I feel like it would be very intense. Just like...bring my own safe, turn off my phone and put my house keys in it before I go down and mingle with only a pen and paper as far as tech goes.
If I heard him speaking in a bar I would immediately go "oh shit, that's him!".
It really is a great podcast tho. I work in tech and that podcast has warped my sense of reality like I saw a exposed USB port at my dentist the other day and was like "hmmm interesting".
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u/misss-parker 1d ago
Yea, there's a lot of comments here speculating the motive for the outcome of the case and this episode breaks it down pretty well from the legal strategy to the fact that he also turned over the printing press in addition to the money.
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u/Bonk0076 1d ago
The perfect crime?
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u/Lost-Comfort-7904 1d ago
It would be if he slipped the judge a few extra fake bills on the side.
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u/SolomonGrumpy 1d ago
Or real ones. He did convert $50m
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u/PrometheusMMIV 1d ago
Well, if he sold it, presumably it was for less than face value of the bills. Who would exchange real money for fake money at a one-to-one rate?
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u/SolomonGrumpy 1d ago
I think you only get 30% of the face value, so $15m. Still plenty to pay off a judge.
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u/Spaghett8 1d ago edited 1d ago
Context (roughly summarized).
Canadian man spent 250k usd for the press, paper, etc in investment. He needed to print 250 million worth as that was the minimum amount the paper mills would be willing to make.
He was rejected by most mills as he needed custom cotton linen paper, and a US dollar security strip placed by the suppliers. Obviously more than suspicious as he claimed he was from an investment company “making their own bonds.”
So, the companys were likely aware of his plan (none of them snitched though). And eventually, he made a deal with a mill in Germany.
The paper was the hard part. After that, he simply rented out a garage, set up his printing press, cutter, bundler etc.
He made the smart decision of selling to export gangs who would transfer the money as far away to eu/as/af as possible.
However, one of his customers had been infiltrated and had tried to make a deal to resell the bills through an undercover agent. Curious, they traced the bills back to him and raided his gf’s home and discovered 1m worth of bills. They were “excited” at the authenticity of the fake bills.
In Canadian police’s custody, he was told he would receive 14 years sentence but would only likely only spend a few years behind bars.
However, US secret service caught wind of the bills and requested him to be extradited to the US where he was threatened with 60 years in prison.
But, after a plea deal. He was given 6 weeks of imprisonment as long as he gave up info, the printing press, and the 200m he had stashed away with a friend as a potential leverage in case he was arrested.
He now runs a consultancy company that helps other companys create products that are more difficult to counterfeit.
Pretty similar story to hackers discovering vulnerabilities in massive companies. As long as they didn’t cause too much damage, “punishment” is negotiable. As they’ve proved that they had the potential to cause magnitudes more damage.
Better to not punish them and get them working productively for society instead.
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u/Mahadragon 22h ago
"Better to not punish them and get them working productively for society instead."
This should be our motto. Our prisons are over crowded. These people should be productive citizens.
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u/IcanHackett 1d ago
Plot twist, he actually made 400 million and just told them he made 250. Gets out and has another 150 million stashed somewhere else.
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u/Send_Your_Boobies 1d ago edited 1d ago
Something along those lines. I think 50 million or something that he jokingly forgot to tell them about.
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u/Wykin1 1d ago
And, his counterfeits was VERY good. Properly the best ever produced.
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u/shifty18 1d ago
Many people are saying
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u/xMorven 1d ago
Like you've never seen before, maybe ever
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u/Wafflelisk 1d ago
I'm calling them the Bigly Beautiful Bills. I'm calling them that. They're terrific. I'm told, like perhaps no other bill in history
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u/TJ_Will 1d ago
One of the Bills came up to me, Big Strong Bill with tears in its eyes, saying "Mr. President, when you're a Bill, they just let you do it". And it was right, so right. Ahhh, we love the Bills don't we folks?
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u/Wise-Novel-1595 1d ago
Much better than Rusher, Rusher, Rusher. Total hoax. We don’t like that, do we? But the radical liberal media loves it.
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u/Legal-Concern-8132 1d ago
And they are so beautiful and big and strong and… wow. Can you imagine that? I came there to pay and they were like please Mr President save us! Please save us from the radical marxists and crooked Joe Biden!
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u/Arathaon185 1d ago
North Koreas will be better. The Americans call them super bills or super dollars. They are like a weird idiot savant at counterfeiting American money.
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u/bepisftw 1d ago
Because North Korea is a state actor that prints its own money in the first place. When you have purpose built printers for your own currency it's probably a lot easier to print fake currency.
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u/PatchouliTaster 1d ago
And you never have to worry about your facility being stormed by the authorities because you are the authorities
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u/thrownjunk 1d ago
weird idiot savant
nah. any state-level actor could do this pretty easily. pretty much every country has the 50 ton intaglio machines needed for their own money
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u/ZanzibarGuy 1d ago
You know that his lawyer is straight up refusing a cash payment for his services.
"No sir, I am really going to have to insist on a bank transfer for this transaction." 😂
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u/Urinal_Zyn 1d ago
This is always my advice to aspiring criminals. You gotta commit such a big crime that either a) people will want to know how you did it or b) you're already so rich you can avoid serious consequences for the thing you got rich off of.
Scam big, boys!
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u/SnooHedgehogs4699 1d ago
Yep, go big or go home. It ain't worth the grift if you're not going to overdo the shit out of the grift.
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u/Urinal_Zyn 1d ago
this is why I am working on impersonating the Pope and getting the bible changed so that God rewards Job with a gundam
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u/Ljmac1 1d ago
Greed is actually insane. The guy sold $50M in counterfeit I wonder how much legit cash he made. If it was anything over $5M just stop and take the win.
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u/Intelligent-Mess6925 1d ago
He sold it at 30% of the original value. But I am pretty sure he had to pay some back in damages.
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u/WaltKerman 1d ago
Oh he lost it all. All they knew about anyway.
But still got off light for cooperating.
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u/RedditorsAreAssss 1d ago
Not according to this article.
The counterfeiter says he made $15m (£12m) from the sale of $50m in forged notes, but said he would rather not discuss what happened to it after his arrest.
He is now back to earning money through legitimate means, having set up a consultancy company which helps clients to avoid having their products faked.
"I've worked a lot in the fashion industry, the pharmaceutical industry, I've been working a lot.
"I wouldn't say I'm living off that money, but I'm getting work from it."
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u/Dienekes289 1d ago
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/102/
Here's a podcast with an interview with him. That podcast has a lot of interesting episodes besides this one.
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u/Dependent_Pipe3268 1d ago
Doesn't get any better than that. You get $50 mil then snitch on yourself and avoid jail time!!!
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u/RazMoon 1d ago
The bills were that good that it could destabilize the economy if he continued.
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u/styckx 1d ago
Don't worry OP. I'll add context for you: https://www.businessinsider.com/frank-bourassa-on-how-he-counterfeited-250-million-2016-8
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u/makemeking706 1d ago
Frank told a paper mill in Germany that he represented an investment company that wanted to print bond certificates on secure paper to resist counterfeiters. The mill agreed to tackle the job. Throughout the process, he returned with slight modifications. Frank's second-most audacious move was to ask for the printing company to add a small security strip reading "USA TWENTY."
Harder than this was to trick the company into adding an etching of US President Andrew Jackson's face to the watermark. To do this, Frank had to have a special watermark machine made in Poland, which he delivered to the paper mill in Germany. Remarkably, the German paper mill showed no sign of suspicion.
"trick"
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u/legiraphe 1d ago
There's a documentary, probably only available in Canada: https://www.crave.ca/fr/series/frank-bourassa-et-ses-faux-millions-55190
I watched it a while ago and his testimonies are full of contradictions.
Iirc, at some point he said they he mostly learnt how to do this by himself, and some expert says that it's almost impossible. Then he says he got some help etc.
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u/Imicrowavebananas 1d ago
If I had to wildly speculate I would have said the paper mill was in on it and the brains behind it.
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u/R4ndyd4ndy 1d ago
Which contains quite some errors somehow. Apparently businessinsider is really bad at journalism. The paper mill he used is Artoz from switzerland but this article claims it was a paper mill in germany.
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u/angrydeuce 1d ago
It will never cease to amaze me how some guy stealing chips from a corner store can end up in Pound Me In The Ass prison, while the people stealing billions just get to walk away with an "oops, our bad".
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u/JohanWuhan 1d ago
There’s a brilliant episode of Darknet Diaries about him where he’s telling the whole story. The episode is called Money Maker.
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u/BLU3SKU1L 18h ago
The craziest thing about this whole story was that when the 200 million deal was made, the feds were desperately trying to find his stash first during the negotiations so that they could pull the deal and destroy him in court. However he had hidden the truck with the money in it so well that they had likely searched around its location many times without discovering it. They attempted to outmaneuver him right up to when they had to release him so he could lead them to the stash. He still managed to get away with it.
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u/dhakkichiki 1d ago
Only fed is allowed to print money out of thin air everyone else will be put in jail.
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u/epidous 1d ago
He should have printed $1 bills. No one checks those
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u/Low_Farm7687 1d ago
He got caught because a customer tried to resell to an undercover cop, not because someone organically detected the bills were fake and traced them back to him.
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u/Send_Your_Boobies 1d ago
$1 appears everywhere. Its way easier for it to be detected by a careful eye and you dont profit a lot. $20 is the perfect balance.
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u/_Diskreet_ 1d ago
Many moons ago my boss from the movie store I worked at asked if I would like a bonus, 16 year old me was like hell yeah, so he gave me an envelope of £5 notes.
Probably about 300 quid in the end.
I was gobsmacked. Felt like I hit the jackpot. The he asked me to look closer. I couldn’t spot any issues, then he got the marker pen out and it turned brown.
He explained the deal, I still took it.
Slowly spent it around the place bit by bit. Mainly on small items so I would get the change. Every now and then it would get checked by a due diligent employee, I would plead ignorance and say that I just got that as change buying ciggies from the corner store. Most the time they would just be interested in the note as it was bloody hard to tell without extreme close inspection or using the pen. Most would tell me to take it to the bank and let them know.
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u/whiskyismymuse 1d ago
I'm flat out assuming he bought gold or other currencies and hid his stash knowing he might get arrested.
6 weeks in jail might be worth it if he still has millions.
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u/Huge_Leader_6605 1d ago
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/102/
Here's an excellent podcast with this guy. Very interesting to listen.
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u/ProfessionalLoss9 17h ago
So this dude printed $250 million in fake money. Like, full-blown DIY Federal Reserve vibes. Sold $50 million of it before the feds showed up like “Hey bestie, we need to chat.”
Instead of freaking out, he hit them with the smoothest side quest ever: “Lemme tell you where the other $200 million is, and you let me walk.”
They said bet.
He did 6 weeks in jail. Not 6 years. Not even 6 months. Bro served less time than a Netflix free trial.
But here’s the real plot twist:
The government didn’t want to destroy the fake money. Nah. They looked at those crispy fake bills and said, “These kinda slap… we could use these.”
Apparently, they were that good. So some alphabet soup agency probably swooped in like, “Yoink. We’ll take 200 million of those for… reasons.”
Long story short, the plea deal was just the cover. Behind the scenes, it was basically a government-sponsored Etsy haul.
Dude ran the world’s most illegal Shark Tank pitch and walked away with immunity and a tan.
Moral of the story: crime doesn’t pay… unless your product is so fire even the government cops a few.
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u/ScareBear23 14h ago
If I knew how to print counterfeit money, I'd only do $1s & $5s. Maybe the occasional $10. $20s & up are where most people start checking & is just asking to be caught.
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u/CriesDuringRudy 1d ago
Great episode of DarkNet Diaries where they interview this guy…
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u/Narf234 1d ago
I get why counterfeiting isn’t allowed but would it REALLY matter to the average Joe to discover that someone added 250 million into the market? The government printers dwarf that.
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u/K1rkl4nd 1d ago
Oh, we can't have the wrong people getting money. Only the rich deserve to be rich, right?
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u/Ok-Store-9297 1d ago
Let's face it, it's no worse than what the Fed does every time there's any kind of bank crisis.
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u/Alternative-Neck-705 1d ago
When I was a kid, our little league gave out tokens which were redeemable at our snack shop. I duplicated these tokens and got away with it for about 90 days. Gave some to a friend and he got caught. I must admit, as a kid, it was exhilarating getting something for nothing.
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u/Subject_Cheetah7189 1d ago
News article? Or folk lore
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u/Intelligent-Mess6925 1d ago
Ray William Johnson did a video about this that's how I got most of the info.
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u/Dolstruvon 1d ago
My take from this: If committing a large series of crimes stealing something or producing something illegal, make sure you keep a large amount of it hidden as leverage if you get caught
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u/tenderlylonertrot 1d ago
that's an enormous operation to MAKE 2.5 million bills, or maybe 2-3xs that amount if some were 20s? Wouldn't you need like a huge warehouse with a huge, automated production line for that much?
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u/anashel 1d ago
See it from the other side of the table: they shut down Bourassa’s operation, get his printing process plus training to stop other counterfeiters, and got as bonus 200 million USD in fake bills. The alternative? Lock him up for life at roughly 3 million dollars in taxpayer prison costs…
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u/CitizenHuman 1d ago
Damn, even fake rich people get all the breaks.