Episode 3: The Buck Stops Here
Feb 28, 2014
With the advent of the Inkjet printer, counterfeiting money became as simple as a trip to Staples. By the year 2000, there were 72 million of these homemade dollars in circulation. The real question is… who was behind them all?
if your money is in a big bank it's working a lot harder for shareholders than it is for you but there's an alternative SF Fire Credit Union as a member owned Credit Union s of fire is committed to giving everyone in the Bay Area the financial tools and local service they need to succeed so if it's time for your first house a new car or just time for a clean break from your bank discover what you've been missing visit SF fire CU dot org to learn more
► 00:00:30hi it's Phoebe I know this is a time of year when a lot of organizations are asking you for money they can make me feel bombarded so I'm going to keep this very short radio Topia is not a corporation it's a collective of independent podcasts and in order to stay strong and keep growing we need your support if you listen to shows like criminal and this is love and ear hustle and everything is alive I hope you'll go to Radio topi
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► 00:01:14so he was about 6-3 6-4 kind of lanky but played basketball so muscular like huge nose big lips this is my and when she was 19 she was infatuated with a guy named Adam these names aren't real we're using fake names for reasons that will become apparent later just kind of hit all my personal buttons in a way that honestly very few people
► 00:01:40since then it was almost as if he was my physical idea on I actually remember seeing him for the first time I freshman year and really feel like my breath had been taken away when you're infatuated with someone you can convince yourself of a lot of things like who they are and what they're capable of and Maya was infatuated I had this feeling of really not being able to believe that I was like allowed to physically touch this person but just because you can touch something doesn't mean it's real
► 00:02:10I'm Phoebe judge and this is Criminal
► 00:02:17so our first date was actually pretty hilarious I'm not sure exactly how it was arranged by was very very very excited about it for multiple reasons one that I was just physically kind of putty when I looked at him even but also because he lived in Brooklyn and so we both went to NYU but he and I lived in the dorms in the city and he had an apartment in Brooklyn and I think I've been to Brooklyn once so that
► 00:02:44night we actually went to a magazine party because he had worked at a magazine briefly before school so I was at this very sophisticated party and he people were very much in love with him there and women were all over him there the way they were everywhere but it was definitely an older crowd I mean I must we must have been 19 and everyone was probably in their late 20s and I got completely hammered like so shit-faced and I think he actually had to carry me back to his apartment which was of course mortifying so we went back to his apartment he put on some D'Angelo
► 00:03:14I think he smoked weed we both smoked some weed and I was like this is actual heaven like this is my understanding of what happen is but then nothing could really happen because I basically blacked out
► 00:03:25the next day I woke up and they were you know like blunt paper is kind of all over the floor and this and that and he was like yeah you passed out so basically just smoked weed like listen to music and I was really embarrassed and then so we started our Trek back to the city I wasn't really sure how to get home and he got our kind of the standard bacon egg and cheese has and I think I got a coffee he got a Snapple and he we went to the train station and he swiped me in on his MetroCard and then jumped the turnstile immediately a plainclothes police officer started chasing him
► 00:03:56so I was stuck holding his breakfast while he takes off like a bolt of lightning and is literally being chased around by a cop I see him hiding behind a trash can I see the cop running up a flight of stairs and I just got on the train went back to my dorm with his breakfast and my own and he finally called me either that night or the next morning and just tried to play it off and she let him it didn't seem like that big of a deal it was kind of a funny
► 00:04:25story so while it's not the typical foundation for successful relationship they ended up going out again and again they dated for a couple of years but slowly Maya started to notice other little things like he told her he grew up in the Bronx when he was actually from New Jersey he was always borrowing things from people asking for favors and he managed to almost never spend money they his whole thing was figuring out how to live with nothing so at two points when we
► 00:04:55together we lived for free he had this incredible way of talking his way into kind of people's homes and then saying he would do something for them and he just I've never seen anything like it he would just get away with not paying rent the graduated from college Maya was taking acting classes Adam wasn't working and those little things the law eyes and the mysterious ways in which Adam always got his way began to escalate one of the biggest things he did was steal a projector from a hotel
► 00:05:25that he was just kind of walking through randomly and they found a conference room with a really fancy projector and just walked out with it and was very excited because it was something like 10,000 dollars and he didn't know if he wanted it or if he wanted to sell it but it I got really upset and he basically bullied me into saying you know this Corporation or these people have so much money they're stupid for leaving it out and I need it and I want it and I took it was there so he's doing all of these
► 00:05:55things you kind of know about him what he's doing did you ever help him I didn't help him until we started counterfeiting money
► 00:06:07so how did what do you mean till you started counterfeiting money well one day I came home to the apartment we were living in again living in for free and he very proudly showed me a $20 bill and I said where did this come from and he explained that he had this color printer and he had spent the entire day scanning and then you know kind of lining up copies of $20
► 00:06:36bill so that he could create something that was two-sided and actually it looked pretty decent and he went through a period of kind of trying to find the right color and finding the right paper because you know now bills feel and are very slick they're very hard to kind of wear down but back then you could still have kind of a nubbly or very rough feeling Bill wait a second it seems it seems to me like you need more than just like a color printer
► 00:07:06order to counterfeit money or like just some special paper I mean isn't that what like there are thousands of people that just spend their whole lives trying to make sure that you can't just buy a color printer and start printing hundreds it was Child's Play kind of I mean it couldn't have been a more basic and kind of pathetic operation I mean it was two kids in their 20s you know fucking around in Brooklyn and it worked
► 00:07:45how long did it take Kim to convince you to actually use the money do you remember the first time it really left the house it did not take long the first time we went out we we did discuss it and we I think we tried it once or twice at a deli and it didn't work I mean what do you mean it didn't work so they would just say this is fake were you mortified like I
► 00:08:06I would just I would I would pretend like are you kidding me I got ripped off like yeah I know I had a whole song and dance every time I got caught like are you kidding what am I supposed to do how did this happen I can't believe this oh my gosh I'm so sorry and it was kind of through these like pathetic little plays that we'd put on that we realized that people were much nicer to me if I was the one who did it and got caught they just kind of treated me like a stupid little girl but would actually get much angrier at him
► 00:08:36so what we figured out then was that we really couldn't we wouldn't be successful if we were doing it at a place where people have the opportunity to pay a lot of attention to the money that we were handing them so any place like a well-lit bodega or a supermarket wasn't going to fly so we quickly realized that we needed to do it at bars places where bartenders were busy places where it was dark and people were distracted and what we were doing we weren't interested in drinking or partying we were just interested in
► 00:09:06getting the change so you know $6 beer or $14 back and you pocket that and maybe during part of the drink and leave so one of the first places we went I got caught and I you know performed my little performance and I remember very distinctly the bartender saying I'm going to choose to believe your lie but this isn't real and you need to get out of the bar and I kind of skedaddled and freaked out I made my boyfriend drop the next bill that's what we called it
► 00:09:36girls at another bar and it was actually female bartender and she flipped out and chased him out of the bar and said she was going to call the cops and he was laughing but he was terrified and that's where we really realized that I was the person who was going to be most successful my didn't realize this at the time but she and Adam were part of a trend lots of young people were getting printers and making their own money in two thousand forty percent of all counterfeited money about
► 00:10:0672 million dollars came off of inkjet printers it's a big deal counterfeiting is a federal crime investigated by the secret service if you get caught you're facing up to 15 years in prison and massive fines I don't think we ever hit up more than six places in an evening but inevitably during one of those during those nights someone would stop me somewhere I remember we were on a good streak and then I had to go to this one bar and these are all bars that I liked and had gone to previously and this bar had a bow
► 00:10:36they're out there that particular night and there was a cover charge and I tried to pass off a bill to him and he said that it wasn't real and I was a little bit drunk at that point so I did my whole song and dance and I kind of sense that he knew that I was full of shit but he again just kind of let me wander away and did did you ever go home after lie you know the night where the bartender said I'm going to choose to believe you would you go home at night and say to him this is not like I don't want I did why are we doing
► 00:11:06doing this is not worth it I do not remember ever doing that I think I didn't have the balls because I think that he thought it was really fun and I thought it was a little bit fun myself the final time that I was caught with so bad that that's what made us stop but it took getting that close to being in serious trouble for the rest of my life for me to kind of snap to it - is the whole operation had only ever been the two of them they never told anyone what they were doing and
► 00:11:36ever use the fake money when they were out with others then one night Maya had a childhood friend come to visit he was wealthy and wanted to go someplace a lot nicer than the dive bars they had been going to so we go to this you know super Swanky Club very 90s club scene kind of place and I have a stack of bills and my person a copy of Macbeth that I was using because I was memorizing a monologue from Lady Macbeth's and he I think also had bills on him
► 00:12:06but as usual I was kind of the one in charge how much would you carry when you say you were carrying like a stack of bills how much how much counterfeit money would you carry on you at one time I think at that point I would I probably had around a hundred or a hundred and forty dollars and he probably kept the same amount so he dropped one bill successfully at a register and drink whatever drink he was given then I successfully dropped to build another register and we kind of just kept the evening going and then at the end of the night we were kind of toward the back of the club is one of
► 00:12:36cases that had multiple bars in multiple areas and I was kind of taking it out it was the one we hadn't gone to yet and we were not doing a very good job of being subtle and I was very aware of the bartender this hot female bartender was aware that we were looking at her and she was kind of staring right back and then I kind of entered into this kind of Bizarro dream state where I knew that if I dropped a bill with her I was going to get caught and I physically couldn't prevent myself from walking over to the bar and doing it
► 00:13:08so I walked over I ordered a drink and I slapped down the bill and she immediately knew it was fake and I kind of tried to launch into my little song and dance and she said she grabbed my hand and she said I'm calling security and I don't know if she got on the phone or pressed a button but I was immediately swarmed by security guards and taken into the back of the club they didn't go through my bag I refuse to give them my ID and I just kind of kept saying I don't know where this came from
► 00:13:36so sorry this is so stupid I then try the tactic of getting really angry and saying that my friends were waiting for me and then they got on their walkie-talkies and they said check all the registers and then I thought I was sunk because there were definitely bills and other registers and at that point I thought okay I'm done
► 00:13:59she waited while the bartender's carefully checked each piece of cash and somehow which seems just like incredible luck no one found anything the bartender's must have already passed the fake 20s on his change to other customers they let me go and I did not act cool I immediately kind of tore through the entrance and pushed through push past the bouncers and push through the line instead of the exit and I went out alone away from my friends I just felt like I just had to get out of there and
► 00:14:29I didn't realize was that by doing that I was causing a scene and essentially incriminating myself so my friends followed me out and then the same security guards who had been detaining me intercepted me on the street they went through a back exit of the club and they said why are you in such a rush to get out of there and then this is the whole scene that unfolded in front of my friends they said okay we're searching you you know this and that and I said you can't you can't that's not legal and they said it's again it's either us or the cops and finally I just gave them my purse and
► 00:14:58they they looked through my wallet and didn't find any bills because the bills weren't there and then they flipped through make the Macbeth and they didn't find it they just didn't they just flipped past it I think probably because they were only a few bills and it wasn't it didn't cause enough of a gap for like when they were skimming their finger over it to find it but it was I didn't understand how that happened it was almost impossible and where is your boy was your boyfriend watching this whole scene he was watching and also were all of my
► 00:15:29wealthy friends what happens next you go home with your boyfriend so I went home with my boyfriend we were both really upset we both agree that we weren't going to do it again and then I met up with my good friend from home the next day and he said so are you counterfeiting money and I just looked at him and I said nope and we kind of had a mutual moment where we decided to agree to believed my lie because he definitely didn't believe me and I definitely wasn't about
► 00:15:58to tell him the truth
► 00:16:02do you think of yourself as a criminal
► 00:16:06I don't why I think I must I'm not sure why so this is I've never really considered this before but I didn't even though I did have criminal intentions you know I wanted this money I wasn't trying to hurt anyone and don't feel that I particularly hurt anyone although certainly I guess it's possible that if a bartender was caught you know if they were caught with a counterfeit bill in their cash register that they could get fired and that's totally possible
► 00:16:35but to me it was so stupid and has kind of become a bit more fun in retro has become both more fun and much more embarrassing in retrospect you know it's a great story to tell at a party because I wasn't caught and how long did you and Adam last after this incident not long
► 00:16:59my left New York she went to California to try to get Adam out of her life forever which was hard because as much as she was scared of what he could make her do she was still just as fascinated with him as she was from the start it's been more than 15 years but as far as she remembers the only profited about $400 and frankly she doesn't know what they did with it she does know they didn't spend it on anything nice because Adam was so cheap
► 00:17:41the show is produced by Eric mental Lawrence poor and me Julian Alexander does our episode art if you like what we're doing you can subscribe on iTunes or visit our website this is Criminal.com we're on Twitter at criminal show I'm Phoebe dredge and this is Criminal
► 00:18:07if your money is in a big bank it's working a lot harder for shareholders than it is for you but there's an alternative SF Fire Credit Union as a member owned Credit Union s of fire is committed to giving everyone in the Bay Area the financial tools and local service they need to succeed so if it's time for your first house a new car or just time for a clean break from your bank discover what you've been missing visit SF fire CU dot org to learn more
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