Americana
A Million Dollar Bill
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Well, he’ll never go down in the annals of criminal genius. A man was arrested in South Carolina this week after he tried to open a bank account with the fake $1,000,000 bill shown above. The teller (surely laughed and) called the police.
Surprisingly, this happened last month, too. A man was arrested in Pittsburgh after he tried to pay for his groceries with a fake $1,000,000 bill. Reports say he became irate when the cashier wouldn’t make change.
Friends, there never has been a real $1,000,000 bill in the United States. Since 1969, when the Treasury discontinued its $500, $1,000, and $10,000 bills, the most cash you can stash with a single slip is $100. But counterfeiters, you will soon see, are an enterprising and creative lot. At least the ones that try to pass off real denominations are.
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Counterfeit History
As early as the 1690s, paper money was circulating in the American colonies. Within about 50 years, every colony was printing money. And so were the counterfeiters.
Some colonies hired Ben Franklin to make their money, impressed by the printer’s skill at putting details in bills that made them harder to copy. But really, in those early years, paper money was easy to fake–so easy that housewives could support families by forging five-pound notes.
Mother of Invention
That’s what Rhode Island’s Mary Peck Butterworth did. She simply laid a piece of starched muslin over a genuine bill printed in 1715 and ironed it lightly. When she pulled the muslin away, it carried a negative impression of the bill. She then placed the muslin on a piece of paper and ironed it again, transferring the pattern to the paper. After freshening up the image with a quill pen, Mrs. Butterworth had money.
Before long, she was employing most of her family and a couple of hired hands in her lucrative craft. She made so many fake bills that Rhode Island had to recall that whole issue of five-pound notes. She got caught, but because she always burned her muslin cloths, the state had no hard evidence–and Mrs. Butterworth beat the rap.
Worse, Mrs. Butterworth was just the syrup on the pancake. In 1775, when the Continental Congress began to print paper money to pay for the Revolution, rampant counterfeiting helped undermine the currency’s value. People soon referred to any worthless thing as being “not worth a Continental.”
In Banks We Trust
After the Revolution, the Constitution, and the adoption of the dollar as the currency of the United States, it must have seemed like everyone was printing money–and, surprisingly, a lot of it was legitimate. Before the 1860s, about 1,600 private banks were authorized to print “state bank notes,” and each bank had distinctive designs for its currency.
As many as 7,000 designs tempted counterfeiters–until 1861, when the federal government started printing green-tinted “greenbacks” to finance the Civil War. By 1863, Congress had moved to replace the myriad notes issued by private state banks with more uniform “national bank notes” issued by more regulated “national” banks.
And by 1865, amid alarm over the fact that at least a third of the paper money circulating in the United States was bogus, the government established the Secret Service to target counterfeiters. (It wasn’t until 1902 that the Secret Service officially took the job of protecting the president.) The Secret Service cracked down hard on funny money. They might have gone overboard in 1881, when they destroyed the printing plates used to make play money for board games.
Fed Up
Today, every paper dollar in America is a “federal reserve note” printed by the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing and issued only by the Federal Reserve Bank. And the Secret Service continues to track down money cheats.
But counterfeiters have mostly moved offshore, using today’s computer technology–and in some cases, the resources of rogue governments–to iron out bills like old Mrs. Butterworth. The lure of easy money never fades.
