Emerich Juettner spent nearly a decade printing one-dollar bills in his New York kitchen, and the U.S. Secret Service spent nearly a decade unable to catch him. According to Kaushik Patowary at Amusing Planet, Juettner's bills were terrible. Wrong paper, poor ink, blurry engraving, occasional spelling errors. But he only printed singles, and he only spent a handful at a time at diners and bars where nobody bothered to look closely.
The investigation became the most expensive counterfeit case in Secret Service history to date. Agents posted warnings at 10,000 stores and distributed 200,000 placards. Juettner, a 62-year-old Austrian immigrant who took up junk collecting after his wife died in 1937, kept slipping by because he handed each fake bill to a different stranger and moved on. By his own count, no individual ever lost more than a buck.
A 1948 fire finally undid him. Firefighters threw the contents of his junk-stuffed apartment into the alley below, and schoolboys playing in the lot found the zinc engraving plates and thirty "funny-looking dollar bills" in the snow. Juettner got a year, was paroled after four months, and was fined $1. Hollywood adapted the story as the 1950 film Mister 880, and he ended up making more money from the movie rights than from the counterfeiting.
Previously:
• KAWS wins lawsuit against counterfeit operation
• Study: people who buy counterfeit bags likely to buy real ones later
• Vlogger visits a counterfeit book bazaar in Mumbai
• Review of a disarmingly convincing $100 counterfeit iPhone X
• Interesting look at Korea's massive counterfeit streetwear culture
• Counterfeit money up close
• HOWTO spot a counterfeit Aeropress
• Counterfeit Canadian coins could cause a currency crisis
