Jeff Turner, a former counterfeiter serving time for conspiracy to counterfeit U.S. obligations, details his operation using laminated Bible paper, Gorilla Glue, and iridescent eyeshadow to mimic security strips and UV features. Generating roughly $2,500 daily, he spent $380,000 on drugs and luxury goods before an associate's betrayal led to his arrest by the Secret Service and Drug Task Force. After pleading guilty to one count and producing a training video, Turner received a ten-month sentence at Lexington Federal Medical Center, where he remains sober two years post-release while working honestly in a print shop. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Manufacturing Fake Money00:14:56
Before we go into your history, just tell people listening basically why you got in trouble.
Why did you go to prison?
It was a federal indictment for conspiracy to counterfeit U.S. obligations.
Okay.
So you were manufacturing money?
Yes.
Selling them, passing them myself.
And yeah, manufacturing.
Wow.
And how much money did you create and how did you go about, how did you just get into this?
How did you get into making and manufacturing your own money?
Were you making $100 bills?
Yeah, I mean, I did 20s and 50s, but it comes to a point to where every $20 bill is pointless when you could do $100.
You know what I mean?
It's just maximize the profit.
And basically, I read, when I was like 19, I saw this book with the art of making money.
It's about a counterfeiter up in Chicago, Art Williams.
And, you know, I read that and it just kind of like.
Get a little bit closer to the mic when you shop.
Basically, you know, the best way to make money as far as I was concerned was making money, you know.
So I just studied, you know, read as many things as I could.
I read that book, which kind of inspired me to try it, you know.
And I took like one or two of the methods that he used, which was good methods, but I tweaked them.
And so basically he was.
Using like two pieces of paper and gluing them together to embed a strip in a watermark So I went that route.
That's obviously the best way to do it There's there's a lot of people that like will take five dollar bills and bleach them and Print hundreds on them, but then the strip still says USA 5 and it's a different watermark and all that so But I wanted to make them from scratch so basically I started doing it a little bit when I was a 19 or 20 I made some money and then just stopped.
You know, I didn't want to get caught.
It was just a quick thing.
So, back when I moved to Knoxville and kind of got myself in a desperate financial situation, I knew I could fall back on that.
You know what I mean?
And I decided to start doing it again.
So, you were good at it.
That's what I've been told.
When you first did it, did you like, were you?
More so, were you doing it specifically just because you needed to make money or were you doing it like, hey, let me see if I could be good at this.
This will be fun to try.
Or was it just desperation?
Well, I mean, at first it was desperation, obviously, at first.
And then, so my plan was to kind of like, you know, make these hundreds, kind of sell them to people I knew for, you know, 25 cents on the dollar.
So if I were to sell you $10,000, you know, you give me two grand or 2500 for it.
Um, and that was kind of.
My original plan was to just do that a few times to make enough money to get into a new house and you know, you know to live until I found another job and this and that.
But um, after I I, I did it, you know I, I want a buddy of mine that I worked with at that sign company ended up being like a really large drug dealer which I didn't even know.
I went over to his house one day and all this, like I knew he sold some weed, maybe a little bit of coke um, But I went over to his house one day and he had like bricks of, you know, heroin, meth, cocaine, all this stuff.
So basically I gave him the idea.
I'm like, listen, I used to counterfeit.
I can make these bills and if you want to re up in Atlanta, go down to Atlanta and re up with your you know supply.
You can throw some of these in there.
So we kind of did that as like a trial run.
He went to Atlanta, bought I'm not sure the exact amount, but I think I gave him like 5,000 and I think it was 20s at first and it, you know, everything went fine.
So started kind of perfecting the hundreds which so, like the two P, I found that basically The best paper to use for sandwiching two sheets together was Bible paper.
It's really, really thin and opaque to where you could, you know, print the front of a bill and the back of a bill and then on the back of the back, print a strip and a watermark.
And then, like, mist on a little bit of Gorilla Glue spray, squeegee them together.
You know, I had a piece of glass with LED lights behind it so you could see through the bills to line everything up.
Wow.
Squeegee them together.
And then I found uh, the the counterfeit pens are a chemical reaction.
So so when you test a bill, it's a iodine based ink.
So the iodine in the in the ink reacts to starch in the paper, which turns it black.
The ink, so real money, it stays yellow you know what I mean and counterfeits will stay black.
So I figured out that uh, spraying the bills with a lacquer spray, it's basically like clear spray paint, a matte lacquer basically created a barrier, you know, and prevented the chemical reaction between the pen and the paper, you know what I mean.
So, and I'd tweak things here and there and find different methods that worked significantly well.
Like, once you glue the bills together, if you spray a thick coat first to make sure that the counterfeit pens don't, you know, react with the starch in the paper, and then let that dry and then spray another coat from a distance.
It kind of mists on and it gives it a texture.
So like basically, and I'd sometimes iron the bills just a little bit to make them nice and crispy and, you know, rigid.
And I found this iridescent green eyeshadow, which is basically just a color shifting pigment that they sell as makeup.
And I could take, it's like a shader pen, which is an invisible ink pen, and dip it in the eyeshadow.
And color on the little color shifting 100 in the corner.
Um and uh, there was uh invisible.
They got invisible ink Uv pens which like, are basically marketed to like little girls diaries, you know.
I mean you can write in the diary and nobody can read it, and then you shine the black light.
And so I found those in red ink.
So i'd uh take a ruler over where the strip is and draw a line, that way if, if anybody put the bills in a black light, the strip would appear to to glow red as well.
Um, so I knew like, with all those features uh beat, you know, there's really no way that anyone could prove that these bills were fake, if they even suspected it.
You know what I mean.
Because it marks with the pen.
It's got the strip and the watermark in it.
Color shifting ink, it glows in the backlight.
The only way that really you could tell is if you put it in a machine to check the magnetic ink, like a bill validator or money counters at banks.
So by the time the bills hit the bank, the bank would discover they were fake.
But at that point, you know, it would be a week later.
Nobody on the street could ever find out.
No.
I've had bankers.
One time I went into a Chinese food restaurant and went to break it.
And there was this little old Chinese woman.
She was holding it up and she wasn't sure.
So one of her regular customers was a banker.
And he was sitting over there.
So he's like, oh, is this bill real?
And gave it to him.
And he said it was real.
So I've had drug dealers.
I mean, one drug dealer, I gave him a bill and told him that they were fake.
I was like, you know.
You want to start buying these from me?
He didn't believe me that they were fake.
Because once they mark with the pen, I mean, everybody just marks it with the pen or holds it up to look for a strip or a watermark or you know what I mean?
What does it actually do when they mark them with the pen?
Basically, it's ink in the pen that's iodine based.
That iodine reacts with starch.
So all paper is treated with starch except for currency money.
Oh, okay.
If you, if you mark any any regular paper, it'll mark black because the iodine reacts with that starch and turns black, whereas real money doesn't, so it stays yellow.
So it's just a way to you know the pens are, you know, to detect counterfeit currency.
But, like I said I I would spray my bills with a lacquer.
That's what the lacquer did.
Yeah, so when you go to mark the the paper, you're really not touching the paper because there's a clear coat of lacquer over it to separate the the pen from the paper.
Okay um, It seems like a very intricate process and a long process.
When you started doing this at scale, printing thousands and thousands of dollars, I can't imagine how your process would change.
You're doing this with Bible paper still?
Yeah.
The hardest part was acquiring the Bible paper, really.
I would take road trips all up the East Coast, pretty much, to go to cities, to go to bookstores, and rip out blank pages because a Bible has like anywhere from two to 20 blank pages in the back usually.
So, you know, if you go into a Barnes & Noble or bookstore or whatever and open a Bible and I just have a little razor knife and cut 10 blank pages out, do that over and over again.
So say if there's five blank pages in each Bible and you're in a bookstore with 100 Bibles, you know, I mean, that's 500 pages, which is, you know, you could make 25, 50 grand off of one bookstore.
Wow.
So, but I mean, it got to the point where eventually I I'd already been to every bookstore in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, up to Lexington, Cleveland.
Holy shit.
But, yeah, so I was basically selling.
I wanted to just sell these bills to people.
And not use them?
No, I was nervous, you know what I mean?
Because I knew I would constantly analyze these bills, always try and make them better, you know what I mean?
But you kind of get in your head, you wonder, I think they look good, but you sit there and look at something all day, every day.
You wonder if, you know.
You're paying attention to the finest details of it.
You see everything that's wrong with them probably, right?
Yeah.
So the first time I went, I think for whatever reason, I just grew the balls, walked into a Taco Bell, and she held it up, and boom, cashed it.
No problem.
So I was okay, you know.
So it kind of started doing more shopping sprees.
You know what I mean?
You hit up a couple more places, they take it, no problem.
Every other time, they'd either mark it with the pen or hold it up.
A couple people sometimes would, you know, analyze it a little bit.
But like I said, there's every feature is beat.
I mean the bills looked pretty much perfect.
You know what I mean?
I changed all the serial numbers on each bill.
That way you never had more than one bill with the same serial number.
You know, so, and there's different ways to like do it without getting caught, obviously.
You know, you park in like a parking lot over here and, you know, walk a few hundred feet just so no cameras in the parking lot can maybe get your license plate or whatever.
So you might park in one section over here and then like walk to a, a mall or in an area with lots of businesses and you could just hit up.
You know each business.
So yeah, that was way more profitable than I mean.
So I also sold them too.
Um, but you know, for ten thousand dollars.
I could sell it for 2500 or I could just go spend ten thousand dollars okay, you know.
So once I got the confidence like yeah, these are all passing, no problem uh, you know, I started doing both.
Okay, just selling them to multiple drug dealers throughout Knoxville.
Um, buying prepaid visa cards, getting money orders oh wow, you know what I mean.
You, if I found like uh, prepaid visa cards have like a three dollar fee added onto it.
So if you get a hundred dollar prepaid visa card it'll be like a hundred and three dollars, a hundred and four dollars.
So you give them two hundred dollar bills and you get 95 change and a hundred dollar prepaid visa card.
And if you go to like a Walmart and hit up like the Electronic Center register and the Garden center and a couple registers up front, I mean you're making a thousand dollars just for that.
You know that one Walmart and I just hit up stores like that all day, every day, for years.
At what point?
Or was there a point where things kind of got sketchy?
Or where to your?
At the point where you're thinking in your head like this might be a little bit too good to be true, like I got to start watching my back a little bit more.
Like this, it can't be this, I can't be right.
Like this gravy train is not going to last forever.
Yeah, at what point did start to get go sideways?
Um well, my original plan was to to just sell them to drug dealers.
Basically, but Ultimately, I had a drug habit at the time as well.
So a lot of it was ripping off drug dealers, you know, buying the heroin with it, you know.
So most of the guys, like I'd get one drug dealer for, you know, spend 500 bucks, 500 bucks, 1,000 bucks, you know, until it kind of stacked up to where I got this guy for, you know, 10 grand, 5 grand, something like that.
And usually the guys weren't even mad if they did find out because they were.
Able to.
I mean, it was just like a new right yeah, they could go re-up.
They went to the store.
So a lot of the guys, if they did find out, they were just like, holy shit, you got me like, you know, I mean good job.
And now they wanted to buy them from me because now they knew that they were fake.
They'd be like well, if you're gonna buy, that's a weird thing right, it's kind of like you screwed me, but I didn't get screwed.
Yeah, they respect the game.
You know, chalk it up as loss, but they didn't really lose anything.
So they were, you know, impressed.
They were like, oh shit, you made these all right, keep selling them to me.
Fentanyl and Drug Dealing00:04:28
Or, you know, maybe like I'd keep buying heroin from them, But instead of giving them $100 for a gram, I'd give them $400 for a gram because they knew it was fake.
Now.
You know what I mean?
So you kind of just do that.
See, in Knoxville, most of the drug dealers are from out of town.
Like people from Detroit and Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta all go to Knoxville.
Why is that?
I think like bigger cities like Detroit, it seems like there's lots of drug dealers there.
You know what I mean?
So they just kind of branch out and go to these mid-level cities.
You know what I mean?
Knoxville is not big, but it's not small.
There's money there.
There's a lot of drug addicts there.
So you've got a lot of people from out of town.
Like it's known in Knoxville that Detroit boys is what everybody calls them Detroit boys because it's just a group, a large group of people from Flint, Michigan, Detroit, Michigan.
And I was doing business with a lot of those guys.
Yeah, I mean, Tennessee is known for being like, there's so many like oxy documentaries in Tennessee.
It's crazy.
Like just like the opioid epidemic ripped through Tennessee.
It's heroin now.
Fentanyl.
It's straight up heroin.
It's fentanyl.
Fentanyl.
Really?
Yeah.
People purposely taking fentanyl.
Oh yeah, for sure, really.
I mean there are still people that kind of deny its existence and oh no, this is real heroin, but it's all.
I mean, it's all real or it's all fentanyl.
The crazy thing now that people are talking about is like people that are they say people that buy cocaine are accidentally overdosing on fentanyl.
But I saw like a like.
It seems like a weird thing because fentanyl is the opposite of cocaine.
Yeah right, so if somebody's overdosing on fentanyl and they're buying cocaine, It seems like it would be counterintuitive to the person that's selling that cocaine.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm not sure if there's, I mean, obviously there's cases where people overdose.
Like you're not going to cut cocaine with fentanyl.
No.
Well, your customers obviously aren't going to like that.
The only reason I could think of is either A, because fentanyl is physically addictive.
They might add a little bit in to get people like physically hooked on it.
Or, I mean, fentanyl is so potent that like literally a tiny, like if you had fentanyl in a Ziploc bag and you poured it out to make your heroin or whatever.
And there was even residue left in that bag.
If you then put cocaine in that bag, there's still enough fentanyl to hurt someone that doesn't have a tolerance to it, right?
You know what I mean.
So that's what i'm saying.
It would make more sense that, like if say, a drug dealer was selling because I know that they cut heroin with fentanyl right yeah, so if like, a drug dealer sold heroin and sold coke, maybe they cut it up on the same table and a little bit of fentanyl accidentally got into the cocaine, that would make sense.
Yeah for sure, but they would never purposely cut.
You got to think people who are cutting heroin with fentanyl are probably cutting their coke too With something else creatine or a nostalgia.
So if they use the same blender to to mix up their products, or so you know, I'm sure there's cases like that, But everything's circumstantial.
You know what I mean?
I'm sure I'm sure there's probably are people that do purposefully throw fentanyl in it just who knows you know But I think it's different cases for you know everybody just shit happens So people are are really fucked up on fentanyl in Tennessee right now.
Yeah meth meth and heroin well, they say like I said say heroin.
It's really, it's mostly fentanyl.
Everything I've seen it's like just plain white powder, which isn't heroin, you know, but yeah it's.
It's pretty bad in Knoxville.
Meth too.
Meth is a big one really.
Oh yeah, when did fentanyl start becoming a big thing out there?
Um or, I guess I'm from Tampa, so I mean, I the last eight years I've lived in Knoxville and when I, when I first moved there, it was still like pills like Roxy yeah, but they, they just got too expensive.
So I mean, I'd say I started noticing fentanyl probably five, six years ago, you know.
But it's like, I mean they say it's like 10 times more potent than morphine.
Right oh, it's more than that, more than 10 times.
Well, there's different kinds too.
There's like fentanyl, car fentanyl, and then there's other designer, you know u47700, which is like just, you know random designer drugs, but they yeah, they're super strong opiates.
Nowadays they make in China and ship over here, and but Knoxville is bad, like if you walk to a gas station you'll probably have one or two people pull up and offer you heroin.
Mixing Drugs with Counterfeits00:07:16
Really yeah, Yeah, so that I mean that was good as far as Having counterfeit money strangers come up to you and offer to sell you drugs.
of course you're going to, I'll buy some and give them fake money.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Right.
For sure.
Especially if you're never going to see them again, right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I try to keep doing business with them, but there was also like sketchy points when, you know, you wonder if they did find out, if they're pissed off.
You don't want to call them the next day to buy more if they found out.
So you really have to, you know, read people over the phone.
Like I said, in my case, luckily, most people, you know, weren't angry.
You know what I mean?
Right.
There was one guy that, the guy that actually ultimately set me up with the feds.
When I first met him, I was basically like my roommate, roommate, this girl, was getting heroin from him, you know, with my money.
And we got him for probably, I'd say close to 10 grand over the course of like a few weeks or something.
And I guess he's one of his, the bills was in his pocket and it was raining.
So that color shifting, the makeup that I paint on wiped off because it got wet.
So he ultimately found out that the bills were fake.
And I pulled in my driveway one day and he was standing in my driveway like yelling at my roommate.
So I'm like, oh, fuck.
This is going to be a problem.
You know what I mean?
But he didn't know that they were coming for me.
He was because she was the one getting it.
So I just walked by and hear him yell.
And, you know, he's like, I don't care.
I'm not mad.
I just want to know where the fuck you got them from.
You know what I mean?
So when I heard that, I, you know, I started selling them to him.
You know what I mean?
I basically said, like, listen, they're coming for me.
You know, I'll sell them to you for you know, 20, 25 cents on the dollar.
So he was buying anywhere from five, $10,000 worth every time he'd go up to Cleveland to re-up.
Like he'd go and pick up a brick, a kilo of heroin or whatever, usually cut it to two, but nonetheless, he'd want at least like 10 grand worth of my bills to mix in with, you know, his real money.
Really?
So he would give you 10 grand and you would give him 40 grand?
No, I never did that much.
It was more like I'd give him 10 and he'd give me 2,500.
Oh, okay.
I mean, I had multiple different people that I was doing those kind of deals with.
Yeah.
But, you know, he'd normally buy like a brick at a time.
So, you know, if he was spending $40,000, he'd want $10,000, maybe $15,000 of my money to mix in with it.
You know what I mean?
So we were mixing in this fake money with real money.
So there, I mean, it's hard to, it's, you couldn't tell that the bills were fake if I handed you one and told you they were fake, let alone mixing it in with, you know, $40,000 of other real money.
Right.
You just mix it in randomly.
You know what I mean?
So I had, uh, A couple different, like a group of a couple different guys from Cleveland.
Probably about five different guys from Detroit.
A couple guys from Atlanta.
And then, you know, there's random other people that were from Knoxville.
But, you know, so.
So you said this is the guy that initially set you up?
Yeah.
Eventually, he was the one.
How far into this shit did you get before he set you up?
Like, how long were you working with him?
With, I was.
Doing the counterfeiting thing for about two years.
I think he came in the picture probably the last I Want to say six eight months like we had a good You know, so like like I said the Bible paper thing It was hard to come by so after going to bookstores and all this so I basically I was went to a hotel one day and went in the end table to get the Bible to you know get a couple pieces of paper out of it or whatever and it wasn't there So I waved down the maintenance man I was like,
hey, there's not a Bible in my room.
Can you get me a Bible?
So he was like, yeah, I'll get you one.
I'll be right back.
I was like, you know what?
you guys not keep Bibles in the nightstand anymore?
And he's like, no, we stopped doing that.
I got boxes full of Bibles in the maintenance closet.
So I was like, you know, like, give me those boxes.
I'll pay you for those boxes.
You know what I mean?
I got a lot of praying to do.
And that particular guy actually, like, I think I gave him like a hundred bucks for all these boxes of Bibles or something.
And so I got him in the room.
There's probably like five boxes.
I went through, took all the blank pages, and then just went through the boxes in the dumpster.
You know what I mean?
So he noticed that, and he was like, I remember he was like, asking me, like why the did you just pay me for these bibles and then throw them away?
You know it didn't make sense to him, but but yeah, so we started uh, basically paying maintenance men at different hotels to to, you know, bring me boxes of bibles, which that definitely increased the, the production, you know.
So this guy was going up to Cleveland.
How many bills could you fit into one bible page?
Uh, it like your, your typical bible about, like this that you'd find in a hotel room or something.
It's just one side per page, So like because I'm printing the front and the back.
So like those, you know, at a There's usually like about four pages in those little Bibles.
So I mean, it's worth 200 bucks.
So it's not that you needed to get lots of them But there there's other specific types of Bibles like for instance the Jeremiah study Bible Specifically, it's a study Bible.
So the back was full of blank pages to take notes on it said like notes at the top and it was just like 30 blank pages and the Bible was probably, you know this big Notes.
We're printing notes already.
Exactly.
So you could fit probably three sides, like a front, a back, and another front on one page.
And, you know, there was, say, 40 blank pages.
So, you know, what is that?
40 times 3.
120.
I mean, one Bible is worth about 10 grand.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
So, like, if you go into a Barnes & Noble, for instance, there's probably two or three copies of the Jeremiah Study Bible and get those.
you know, random other ones.
I mean, like I said, a bookstore, you could probably get about, say, 50, at least $50,000 worth of paper from one bookstore.
But most cities only have, like, two bookstores in the city.
You know what I mean?
So if you go to Chattanooga, but you hit the two bookstores there, you know, that's $50, $50, $100,000 out of Chattanooga.
You know, you go to Atlanta, there's, say, three bookstores there, there's $150 out of Atlanta.
But it comes to a point to where I went to Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, you know, Sevierville, Lexington.
Cleveland, you know, you just because when you're busting these bills, you also want to travel around, you know, I mean, I think I think the number that I spent in Knoxville was like $380,000 throughout businesses in Knoxville, which that I got a little ballsy.
You spent $380,000 not just on Bibles, but like spending the money, no, just yeah, shopping to convert that money into you know real money.
You go shopping, you buy something for 10, 20 bucks.
Bonding Out for Dope00:14:16
What kind of shit were you buying?
Oh, just random shit.
Like at the time, you know, I had a heroin habit.
So it was converted to cash and then, you know, I'd buy Visa cars to pay for the hotel rooms and, you know, had some designer bags, jewelry, shit like that.
I mean, nothing was no like Ferraris.
No.
I mean, you know, just living comfortably.
Right.
Right.
Wow.
So how did this guy eventually set you up?
So one day he told me, he was like, oh, I bought this.
It was, I think, a 2009 Charger or something.
I guess one of these dudes that was buying dope from him was like, oh, he sold him a car for, like, I think it was $500 and an eight ball of heroin for a 2009 Charger.
So I was like, bro, that's a stolen car, 100%.
He's like, no, the guy gave me a title.
He's like, it's all good.
I'm going to go register it.
I was like, bro, you bought that from a junkie for $500, bro.
It's a fucking stolen car.
Promise you.
Either way, he was convinced because he had the title.
The guy has the title who sold it to him.
So I was supposed to go up to Cleveland with him.
to, you know, we had a maintenance guy that was going to give us some Bibles up there.
I was going to, you know, bust bills throughout the city while he re-upped on some dope.
But like the day before we were supposed to leave, I ended up getting arrested for a failure to appear, like a little warrant I had.
So I got arrested the next day, bond out, but he already went without me, I guess.
So we were renting a house together, and I was kind of you know, printing the money out of the back and he was selling dope out of the front and we shared this house.
So I bond out of jail on that little charge and I go home and his little runner chick, Summer, she basically said like, oh, he went up to Cleveland without you.
So I was like, okay, whatever.
You know what I mean?
And then she basically said like, don't, you know, he told me not to tell you this, but he got arrested up in Cleveland.
So instantly I was like, you know, why would he why would he tell you not to tell me like that's sketchy, you know, it's a red flag for sure And I knew at first I figured it was probably that car I'm like I knew that car was stolen,
you know, I mean, but I also knew he was going up there with he had 20,000 real cash and 5,000 in my bills at the time so I knew You know whether it was because of the car or not he most likely got caught with you know counterfeit money or heroin one of the two, you know and You know by him telling her not to tell me that he got arrested is In my mind, he's cooperating, you know, and trying to, he's going to set me up or attempt to at some point.
So I got, you know, my computers and printers, and I had ventilation fans to spray the lacquer indoors.
It would suck it out the window.
You had like a whole, like, productions team.
Yeah, like a counterfeiting little setup, you know what I mean?
But when I found out he was locked up, I got everything and went to a hotel.
I was like, fuck this, I'm leaving.
Which I'm, well, I mean, I'm glad I did, but ultimately I got arrested anyway.
But so.
I'm staying in a hotel and this other group of Detroit guys put in like an order for like $6,000.
So I was, my plan was to wake up, make this $6,000 to give these Detroit guys.
My, you know, my wife at the time was going to go shopping, whatever.
It was just like a normal day, every day.
And this dude E, the guy from Cleveland, calls me.
So he basically was like, hey, I've got these, that book, a box of Bibles for you.
And I was like, well, just hold on to him.
I don't want to meet up right now.
You know what I mean?
Like, I assume he's cooperating.
And he basically said, I was like, eventually, basically, I was like, well, you know, you just got arrested.
Why didn't you tell me that?
You know what I mean?
Like, why did you tell Summer not to tell me, bro?
You're acting fucking sketchy.
And, you know, he had this story, which kind of made sense, but I still didn't trust him.
You know, he basically said, yeah, that car was stolen.
I got arrested for it.
The money I was going to use to buy the dope, I had to bond out with.
So, I couldn't re up in Cleveland.
So now I'm back in Knoxville and I need to re up.
Can you get me like 700 grams from your Detroit people?
Which is like, I don't sell, you know, I didn't really sell a lot of drugs like that.
You know what I mean?
So for him to ask me that over the phone after he just got out of jail, like it was a huge red flag.
And he's trying to set me up for things that I don't even do.
You know what I mean?
Like I'm doing the counterfeiting thing.
So basically, like he asked me that and I was like, listen, bro, like we're not having this conversation, especially not over the phone.
You know, what are you talking about?
You're the drug dealer.
I'm not.
Goodbye.
So I hang up.
I guess they GPS pinged my phone, though, to my location.
So they knew, they didn't know which room I was in, but they knew that I was in the extended stay hotel in West Knoxville.
So, you know, like I said, that next morning, my wife's going to go shopping.
I was going to, you know, print $6,000 for this guy.
So they leave, and I didn't know this at the time, but I guess as soon as my wife got in the car and started to pull out, they swarmed her, you know what I mean, the police.
It was KPD, Organized Crime Unit, Drug Task Force, Cleveland Secret Service, Knoxville Secret Service.
you know, multiple different agencies.
So basically, but I didn't know this.
My wife just left to go shopping, you know, so I'm in there hanging paper, spraying it, cutting, printing all this stuff, and I hear a knock on the door.
And I, you know, look through the peephole, and it's just black.
Like somebody's thumb was over the peephole.
So at first I was thinking like, oh, these is like maybe somebody's trying to rob me or something.
I didn't know, but I look out the window, and I saw a line of Knox County sheriffs.
You know what I mean?
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, I go to flush some of the money that I was printing.
I threw a bunch in the toilet and flushed it, you know, went down, threw a bunch more in, went to flush it, and they shut the water off because they thought I had a bunch of kilos of drugs in there and stuff.
Oh, okay.
So there was a bunch of one-sided, like unfinished counterfeit money all in the toilet and fucking so the toilet wouldn't flush.
It did the first time, but the second time, I guess.
No good.
But, I mean, at that point, I was already in there with, you know, I'm in a hotel room.
There's nowhere to go.
What kind of shit did you have in there?
You had printers in there?
Yeah, printers, computers, you know, all the different sprays, my little glass light board to like cut everything on and line everything up with.
And the worst part was the files on the computer.
Because all those serial numbers, I changed every serial number.
So when they got the computer as evidence, that basically linked me to all these different serial numbers that they found throughout the country.
Yeah, that was a wrap at that point.
So what was going through your head, bro, when you were trying to flush that stuff?
It wasn't going.
You knew those sheriffs were outside.
Like what?
And it could tell.
And then those doors at that hotel was like steel reinforced.
So like it took them a long time to kick it in.
Oh, really?
I mean, it took about five minutes.
So you wouldn't open it?
You didn't open it?
Hell no.
I mean, you know.
What'd you do while they were trying to kick it in?
I think I just sat there and smoked a cigarette and I was like, man, what are you going to do?
At that point, I think once they started kicking in the door, it was already like bent and fucked up.
So you probably couldn't open it if I wanted.
So you just.
Sit there and wait for them, you know.
But yeah, they charged me on uh originally or at first it was state charges uh until the the Feds could compile evidence and all because they didn't know who I was until that guy.
E told them like two days before that and then they came down from Cleveland to set me up, so you didn't have any drugs on you when they busted through the door.
I think there was a couple grams, but nothing like like no, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't selling drugs, you know what I mean.
So when they busted through the door, then what happened?
Like what they say to you, what they do to you.
I just slammed your ass on the ground and handcuffed me.
You know, they told me we've got, you know, your wife outside.
She's in custody.
There was, you know, an army, like just so many cops everywhere.
You know what I mean?
They took me in on state charges of criminal simulation over 60,000.
And, you know, I think it took like two and a half, three months for the feds to finally compile all their evidence because they went and got a warrant to go through the computer, you know what I mean, get all the evidence they needed, and then they served me an indictment about two and a half, three months later.
Wow.
So you were sitting in like just like a state prison before that?
At first it was just Knox County jail.
You were just in a jail, just like the local jail for months.
And then when the feds got involved, then what happened?
What changed once the FBI got involved?
Well, it's a secret service.
Oh, it's a secret service.
They handle the money shit, right?
But yeah, basically they took me to court one day and my public defender was like, you know, they're dropping their charges on you, but I because I knew the state or the feds were going to pick them up, you know.
I mean, if the state drops them, it's so basically they, you know, went to court, the state dropped all charges, and then they walked me across the street to the federal marshal building and they served me the indictment for the conspiracy.
At first, it was a five count indictment for uh, let's see, it was conspiracy to counterfeit U.S. obligations, uh, like a couple counts of uttering U.S. obligations, um.
And I think it was like sale and manufacture of counterfeit U.S. obligations.
So, you know, eventually I pled to just one count of the conspiracy to counterfeit.
Because they'd all run, you know, concurrent anyway.
So they basically just give you the biggest charge and, you know, drop the other ones.
So what did they charge you with?
They charged you, they gave you one charge, and how long do they sentence you?
Well, originally in the feds, it's like a range.
You know what I mean?
You get like, you know, 12 to 18 months or you know, so it's like, Originally I was looking at it was like three years about give or take.
So they came to me with this deal and said, if you can, you know, plead guilty and Show us how you made these bills, make a, make a video to train future agents.
You know, basically Just explain all the evidence, what it was, how I learned about it, you know all that and make a training video for future Secret Service agents, then they would not charge my wife and keep the restitution amount under $100,000, because that's an enhancement.
So once you make more than $100,000, you get more time.
You know what I mean?
Because it's like an enhancement in the feds.
So they basically said, they were like, at this point, we found $380,000 in Knoxville.
We're still finding about 10 grand a week coming in through the bank.
So they were like, if you plead guilty now, we'll keep it at under 100 and not charge your wife.
So basically I made like a video.
They flew a film crew down to Knoxville and like filmed me making bills.
Really?
In the Secret Service headquarters.
Really?
Yeah.
What was that like?
So you were in prison while you had to film this, right?
Like you were still doing your time?
No, no.
This was, they actually, well, they let me out on pretrial release for some months before I was sentenced.
Okay.
And that's when I did all that.
So the Secret Service filmed me.
Flew a film crew down to your house.
To the Secret Service headquarters.
Oh, the Secret Service headquarters.
Knoxville.
You met them there.
Yeah.
Did you, like, how did you, did they, did you have to give them, like, a list of equipment and shit?
Or like, how did that work?
Basically, they just went through and asked me like exactly, you know, what certain chemicals were, why I had certain things.
What did I, you know, use them for?
How did I find out that I could use them for it?
You know what I mean?
Because I had, I would always experiment with stuff trying to make the bills better.
You know what I mean?
So I had like the, that, that makeup, right?
That I made the color shifting pigment out of.
There was one kind that was the best.
But I had like a bunch of other ones because I'd experiment and I was Working on doing the new blue notes as well and that's got a different color shift.
So I had stuff to match that color shifting a certain type of nail polish mixed in with a color shifting pigment I got online.
If you mix them together It makes a perfect copper to gold like on the new hundreds.
So there was stuff like that and, Like I found a it's like a fine tip ballpoint glue pen.
So it's like a regular BIC pen, except it pushes out glue instead of ink.
So like some people to test if a bill's real, they'll scratch the shirt is what they say, which means you feel the texture.
You know, you kind of run your fingernail along his t-shirt on the portrait of the president to feel the texture.
So I ran across a couple cashiers that would do that.
So I had this little glue pen that I'd draw little lines on real quick to give this rigid texture on the shirt.
Just weird.
Little things like that that they've never seen before, or was wondering why I had, you know, these pens or this, you know, this or that, basically.
Life in Low Security Prison00:02:54
Yeah.
And, you know, I basically took my computer, you know, printed a couple bills, glued them, sprayed the lacquer, you know, explained what I was doing.
And, you know, they counted that as cooperation to give me from three years, it got knocked down to 10 months.
Wow.
Yeah.
10 months.
It seems like, I mean, obviously it's a long fucking time, but it doesn't seem like that long for all the shit that you were doing.
I mean, no.
It was definitely a blessing, you know?
Because there was drug dealers that I met, multiple ones, that I would, they'd find out the bills were fake after I was ripping them off or whatever, and I'd offer to sell them the bills, and they'd be like, no, I don't want to fuck with that.
You know what I mean?
That's serious shit.
And it's like, there are people you know trafficking kilos of heroin with guns on them and stuff and they're they're worried about kind of her bills.
You know right, you weren't doing anything violent, so no yeah, so I mean the the time for I mean it's, it's a white collar crime.
So most, most white collar crimes don't look at at nearly as much time as drugs and guns.
They don't, they don't like drugs and guns.
So how long did the process take for you to film that training video for the Secret Service?
Uh, it was probably like two, two hours, two hours.
And how many bills did you make for them?
Oh, just two, just two.
I didn't know at the time.
My, my lawyer was pregnant.
At the time I felt bad after the fact because I was showing them everything and then I take this lacquer spray can and I start spraying it and she was like oh, I gotta leave the room and like ran out.
And I didn't think.
I was like oh, i'm sorry, it smells.
You know what I mean, but later I found out that she was pregnant.
So I felt bad about that.
You know what I mean.
But but she is all good with it.
Oh, my god, that's so wild.
So what what?
Uh, so you only did 10 months.
What was the 10 months like?
Was it a low security?
Yeah, well, it was an administrative facility.
Like a camp?
No, it wasn't a camp.
It's a low security, basically.
There's camps, lows, medium and highs.
I was in, I got sentenced and I had to sit in Knox County Jail for, you know, a couple weeks.
And then they sent me to Blount County Jail, which is the federal holding facility for East Tennessee.
Sat there for like a month.
Then they shipped me to London, Kentucky.
Laurel County is like another federal holding facility.
It's just kind of a holdover until they get you to the compound.
And then they sent me to FMC Lexington, which is, like I said, it's an administrative low.
So it houses low, medium, and highs.
But it's essentially a low security.
And, you know, it wasn't bad.
Shot some pool, you know, worked out a little bit.
Printing Multiple Bill Layers00:07:52
Really?
Yeah.
What kind of guys did you meet in there?
Matt Cox type people?
No, not.
Fraudsters.
Probably not.
I was one of the few.
There was a couple guys that did.
One dude was doing credit card fraud, I think.
Okay.
He was like.
He owned a company and was like basically like overcharging people who, you know.
Gave him his credit card like bought a product from him and then he'd like overcharge them and then refund them and he had some kind of scam to where he made it made out on top and Man in in Lexington Kentucky was mostly drugs and guns You know what I mean?
There weren't a lot of white I was one of the few like white collar Criminals.
I was the only counterfeiter there really well actually there was one guy that was counterfeiting checks.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's super rare for people to counterfeit That amount of bills, right like you're.
You said in the beginning of this that you were one of like how many that have been that have served federal time for doing that.
There's a lot of people that have have served time for counterfeiting, but most in the Secret Service told me this, they they said they were like you're the one, these are the best bills we've seen in 25 years really.
And he was like the.
The majority of all their counterfeiting cases are like, you know, teenagers.
You know, just photocopying, you know, and they don't look good and they usually print a thousand dollars and then get caught and then you know what I mean.
So there's not a lot of professional counterfeiters out there.
I only know of two.
Matt was saying he did the 12 years and he said I think he's only met one or two.
That's what he told me today.
He's like, yeah, I've met two people ever that have done this.
And they were probably just photocopying bills.
You know what I mean?
It's hard to print money because the printers recognize.
If you try to just print a bill, the printer will recognize it and it won't allow you to print.
You know, I mean, so you can go into a photocopier machine and just make a copy, but then they're going to look horrible.
You know what I mean?
So I got around that by, instead of scanning the bill, because if you scan it, it'll just put some, like, penal code as to why you're not allowed to scan money or whatever.
So I'd take a high-resolution camera and take a photo of it and then upload that photo and then adjust, you know, go take it to Adobe Photoshop, the photo, and edit everything and layer it.
I layered it into three different images.
So when you went to print it, You weren't just printing one bill so that you know the the printer couldn't recognize it I'd print like just the background color and Then I'd print all the black work over it and then I'd print the treasury seal and serial numbers So it was multiple different prints printed each layer separately.
Yeah, so the the printer couldn't recognize that I was printing money, you know what I mean?
So it kind of got around So how many layers total and then so you'd print how many layers of this Bible paper?
Well, I mean layers as in like digital right like on Adobe I'd break it to three different pictures You know, one was just the background color.
Basically, the front of the bills had three different prints.
I'd print three times just on the front of the bill.
Okay.
And then the back of the bill, I did two prints.
Oh, on the same piece of paper?
Yeah, yeah.
Got it.
Okay.
So, like, you're just printing a background color first.
So it's just that beige color of money.
It's just a solid rectangle of that color.
And then you put it back in the printer and print all the ink, you know, the black stuff.
And then put it through again and print the treasury seal and serial numbers.
So there was three prints for the front.
two prints for the back and then one print for the strip and the watermark.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that was tricky.
I had to like, in order to print, because the Bible paper is too, too thin.
It'll jam up in the printer.
You know what I mean?
So you have to tape it onto a piece of regular printer paper.
So it's, you know, thick enough to go through and be printed on.
Right.
So like, I'd always, me and my wife would stay up all night just taping Bible paper to printing until we had a stack like this.
You know what I mean?
And then the next day we'd just run them all through and print them out.
You know, so.
It's hard to basically counterfeit.
I mean, most people, when they found out the bills were fake or knew what I was doing, they'd instantly be like, I want, sell me a million dollars worth.
And it's like, each bill, you're literally handcrafting.
You know what I mean?
It's a multiple prints, and then you've got to cut them out, spray them with, if you spray too much Gorilla Glue, it'll fuck up and be too thick.
If you don't spray enough, the pieces will separate.
So it became a fine art of you know, spraying just the right amount, gluing them together, making sure they're lined up, and then spraying the lacquer, a thick coat first, a thinner coat to give it that texture.
You don't want to spray too much lacquer because then it'll be too thick.
It won't feel right.
So, I mean, it was a real like fine-toothed process of, you know, getting them just right.
But after doing it, after about three, four, five months, I got to where, you know, it'd take me, I could probably make like a perfect counterfeit hundred in 10 minutes.
Really?
Usually every day I'd make at least, even if nobody had any orders or anything, I'd make at least 25 bills, 2,500 bucks every day.
And that was just like the money I needed to survive.
You know what I mean?
I was spending at least 2,500 a day on that.
Really?
Yeah.
On drugs?
Well, not all drugs, but, you know, I'd buy my drugs for the day.
You know, we had this nanny that was working for us that, you know, in hotel rooms, out to dinners.
2,500 bucks a day.
That's a lot.
You're like the Tinder swindler.
No.
I haven't seen that.
I'd like to watch that.
Oh, my God.
It's fucking insane.
But you got to think $2,500 in counterfeit hundreds, like in order to bust that and convert it to real money, you know, you're going and buying something for $10, $20.
So, you know, you buy some worthless shit for $20 you don't need just to bust that bill.
Just to bust it right here.
So out of that $2,500, you know, you're really getting a bunch of shit from Walmart and whatever that you, you know, may need, you may not need or whatever.
But so you're probably getting, you know, $2,000 out of that $2,500, even just spending them at stores.
Right.
So, but yeah, $2,000 a day was kind of.
My standard minimum amount of.
Has anybody ever, since you got out, has anyone asked you for any, like, custom artwork or something?
Or, like, no.
Custom artwork of currency?
I've had some people want me to start counterfeiting, you know?
Again?
Yeah.
Oh, shit.
Oh, you can do it because they find out my story and find out, you know, they want me to sell them, but you should make more and sell them, but, you know, I'm not trying.
Do you still, like, run in the same circles, like, have the same, talk to the same people, or has it been, like, difficult to kind of, like, recalibrate your life since you got out?
Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, no, I'm sober now.
I've been sober for, like, two years now, so I don't really associate with any of those people anymore.
It was mostly just, like, drug dealers, you know.
So, do you think you would have got?
I mean, you probably wouldn't have got sober if you didn't go to prison, right?
Probably not.
Probably not.
I mean, honestly, it definitely helped, you know, all around.
It was for the best, you know what I mean?
I was kind of living a crazy life for a long time.
So, has it been hard to adjust since you've gotten out?
Like, has it been difficult to find a place to live, to get work?
And, like, what's that been like?
Well, I just got out, like, three months ago.
Oh, did you really?
Yeah.
But luckily, I, I found a good job, man.
It's working at a print shop.
Cashier Tests and Sober Years00:03:30
So, you know, and I was honest with them up front.
I told them, like, listen, I'm on, you know, supervised release for counterfeiting.
And, you know, they're all cool guys where I work.
So, I mean, obviously your skill with like graphic design, Photoshop and that kind of shit, right?
Did they respect that and be like, wow, you can actually like apply that to something?
And I've been in that trade.
Like I was in the sign business before.
So, signs and graphics are all pretty related.
You know what I mean?
So I've worked at a couple.
Print shops, vinyl shops beforehand, so I've got experience in it on top of the, you know, illegal experience.
But um yeah, they were.
You know they hired me and they're they're really cool understanding if I have to, you know, miss work to go to probation or whatever.
Yeah, they're all good man.
I've really lucked out with that job.
Have you ever talked to uh or met any?
Obviously I think you said mentioning you met a guy in prison that did uh counterfeit credit cards.
Did uh Matt mention that guy, John Boziak, to you?
Yeah, we did, We talked about him.
He showed me a little sizzle reel or something for a documentary or something he's putting out.
Yeah, he was doing something similar to what you were doing, where he was in a room basically printing out and forging credit cards.
Yeah.
I saw, actually, I think I saw the concrete episode.
Oh, did you really?
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
His story was fucking crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, once, like, he was, I'm sure, doing the same thing as far as, like, once you can beat all those little security features, I mean, it ends up being perfect.
You know what I mean?
They just.
And that's what the bills were like.
I mean, if you've got a credit card with a hologram and embossed and, you know, everything right, then people and it works.
You know what I mean?
Why would anyone think that it was fake?
You know what I mean?
It's just success.
You know what I mean?
That's what the bills, you know, ended up being.
It's just like they worked every time.
You know what I mean?
The only times that I ever got turned down was if I went to like a Walmart too many times and I'd keep going, keep going.
And then they'd.
You know eventually that hit the bank and the bank would inform management and then management like one time I went into a grocery store and I gave this bill to this cashier.
She broke it like a week later I happened to go back to the same grocery store and it was the same cashier I recognized her and she this time I handed her the bill and she held it up and was looking at the strip and watermark marked it with the pen held it up again and I was like you know was there a problem like you know and she's like oh yeah, we just I got a counterfeit bill last week, so I'm just double checking everything.
I was like, okay.
And she still accepted it.
You know what I mean?
So like, and that happened a few different times.
People would say like, oh, we've been getting counterfeit bills.
But I mean, if you market with the cashier.
They don't remember where they got it from.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they're passing all the tests.
There are certain tests a cashier does to you know, see if it's real or not, and right, you know everything was legitimate, you know it all looked legitimate.
So um, but yeah, I mean there were times to get like money orders and give them.
You know, i've got the little victim list or whatever, with all all the the bills that they found, you know, at different businesses.
And there's some like, get Western Union for 12 1500, or there was one case where we knew uh, the manager at a gas station that would just open the safe and just switch out, you know, fake bills for real bills.
Judge Citation and Halfway House00:03:12
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
So there's a bunch of different, like, little scams or ways to get them off.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's an interesting, it's a really, like, unique thing because it's, like, it doesn't really hurt one specific person.
You can kind of, like, pass it along.
You know what I mean?
Like, everyone can kind of benefit from it.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't making enough money to, like, actually affect the economy.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
So really, I mean, what is, I mean, if everyone thinks it's real, it looks real, and it passes everywhere, like, essentially, it's who are you hurting?
The other way.
Right.
You're not really hurting anybody, are you?
Well, the judge seemed to think so.
The judge thought so.
And the judge was really religious, so she didn't really like the Bible paper thing.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
I actually got arrested one time at a Walmart for theft because I was stealing Bible paper.
Like, I went in, like, ripped a couple pages of it.
They arrested you for ripping the Bible paper out?
Well, they they saw me.
They pull me aside and say, oh, we saw you stuff something in your pants.
You know what I mean?
Because I just put it in like, you know, the top of my pants after, you know, I took a Bible, took out some blank pages and tucked it in my pants.
And they were like, you know, we know you're stealing something.
We saw you stuff something in your pants.
And finally, they like took it out and just saw a bunch of blank pages of fucking Bible paper.
They're like, what is this?
Like, why are you doing this?
And I didn't know what to tell them.
You know what I mean?
I can't admit to what I'm actually doing with it.
So I was just like, I don't know what to tell you, bro.
I probably looked fucking crazy.
You know what I mean?
But.
Yeah, they just gave me a little citation for a theft or whatever.
Oh, okay.
They didn't know, you know, why I was ripping up blank pages and stuff in my parents.
It's kind of embarrassing, but that's insane.
Yeah.
So are you, like, paying back a certain amount of your income to restitution right now?
Yeah.
The restitution, like I said, they kept it under $100,000, so I think it's like $96,000 some odd dollars that I got to pay back.
They don't make it easy to bounce back, man.
Well, no, I mean, it's it's only been three months I've been out and yeah, it's not easy for sure I'm still living in a halfway house are you yeah, cuz me and my wife separated while I was in prison So I had to basically the house that I was gonna go to in North Carolina I couldn't because we were separating so They had to send me back to the sentencing district so I originally caught my charges in Knoxville So I had to go back to Knoxville, Fuck.
So they took my car.
I got no place, you know, so I just had to go to a halfway house, you know, I mean, but luckily I landed that job and you know i'll get back on my feet.
But well, cool bro, I really appreciate coming down here and uh and telling your story.
Man, i'm sure people are going to love it.
Tell if uh, is there a place that people can like find you, if they want to like reach out to you or um, I mean, i'm on facebook.
I was talking to Matt about starting a podcast.
Maybe you know dealing with uh, you know, fraud and white collar yeah, and stuff.
But yeah, you should haven't gotten to it yet.
I've been out three months, but i'm, i'm a, i'm a work to everything.
So people want to like hit you up or or talk to you, or they can hit you up on facebook.