My name's Jeff Turner, I've printed over a million
dollars in US banknotes, and this is how crime works. I've been called "the
Picasso of counterfeiting." From my perspective, it
wasn't that hard to do it, if that makes sense. It just took a lot of
trial and error, basically. The bills just progressively
got better and better until eventually got caught. And the Secret Service
said the bills I was making were the best they've seen in 25 years. I started counterfeiting
when I kind of found myself in a desperate financial situation. I wrecked a work truck, so I lost my job, and I had a newborn baby at home, the lease was up in our house, so I was just kind of in a desperate spot. I was just trying to think of some way to get my family back
on their feet, you know? And counterfeiting just ended up being the safest, easiest way. The majority of the money I printed was the '96-series $100 bill. I also counterfeited some of
the 2013, the new "blue notes," but really that was
more of a hobby for me, just kind of a challenge. The longest process to
start counterfeiting was making the digital files. I would say I spent two months of just editing these images. Really, Wikipedia has pretty high-resolution
photos in their stock, and I broke the image
down to multiple layers. So I would have one image of
just the background color. I'd jumble up the serial numbers. I knew I needed to find a real thin paper that was opaque enough
to where you couldn't see the strip and watermark
through the face of the bill. I went through rice paper, vellum paper, tracing paper, toilet paper,
wrappers on toilet paper. I ended up finding that
Bible paper was perfect. Bible paper glows a dull
purple, just like money does. I would acquire the Bible
paper by going into bookstores and just kind of taking
out the blank pages. Inevitably, I ran out of
bookstores in Knoxville. I would coat the bills with
a matte lacquer spray can, which basically enabled the
counterfeit-detection pens to mark yellow. I would also use a invisible-ink UV pen to draw an invisible line over the strip. I also found a certain type
of iridescent green eye shadow that I would basically
paint onto the "100" in the bottom corner to kind of replicate the color-shifting ink. One cashier would run her fingernail along Benjamin Franklin's shirt to kind of feel the rigid texture. I ended up going to, like, a Hobby Lobby, and I found a fine-tip glue pen. It would dry and give a
little texture to his shirt. The 3D security ribbon
on the modern $100 bill was hard to crack. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing kind of outsources a
company to produce the paper and some of the security features, and I was able to find the patent rights, so it was like, it basically
explained how to do it. The trial and error was
definitely frustrating. When I first started counterfeiting, I would just experiment, and I'd mess up five for
every one that I made well. Towards the end I could make a perfect counterfeit $100 bill in probably five or 10 minutes. I've had a few printers
kind of break on me. Sometimes the paper would
just get so jammed up. It's not so much noisy, because
I'm using digital printers, but the matte lacquer spray smells really bad. So a lot of times maids at hotels would come into my room thinking we're, like,
huffing paint or something. I'd have to say, "Oh, my
wife spilled nail polish," or, you know, just make
up these little lies. But eventually, I rented a
house and I had ventilation fans that would suck the matte
lacquer out the window, so I could kind of spray the bills in front of this exhaust fan that, it kind of sucked it out the window. There weren't really big
stockpiles of counterfeit money. I would try to essentially
launder the money every day. So I'd print maybe $2,000, $5,000 in the morning and early afternoon, and then I'd try to break all those bills before the end of the night. There was probably 10 or
20 of the big corporations, retail, grocery stores,
Walmart-type stores. And those were the best
to break the bills at. I also sold bills to people. 25 cents on the dollar was
kind of the going rate. If I was breaking a bill in a store, I would try to go to female cashiers, and if I sent women in with the bills, I would tell them to go to male cashiers. When I would break a bill, I'd
give them the exact coinage to kind of distract them a little bit. The majority of your
amateur-type counterfeiters get kind of called out at the register, and they'll get a license-plate
number or something. And I would always park my car far away, so they could never get my license plate. I steered away from self-checkout machines because they were just too hard to beat. And some of them even
have photographic software where it just analyzes the micro-printing and all that stuff. In the beginning, I was definitely nervous because I spent so much
time perfecting these bills that I would notice any little error or anything like that. I think I've got an attention to detail that most people probably don't have. And the knowledge I have
for the security features, I study extensively. There was a few times that I would go to the same grocery store and it turns out that the
bills I'd spent last week, they found out about them. But really, most of the
time when a cashier, even if the cashier
kind of knows it's fake, they usually give it back to you. Over the two years that
I was counterfeiting, I probably only had maybe three or four cashiers turn me down, and I was spending thousands
of dollars every day. Luckily for me, they only had, I think, like, 12
surveillance videos of me. So I was pretty good about
kind of staying anonymous. There was a be-on-the-lookout
for me and my wife breaking a bill at a specific store. They didn't know my name,
though. It was just a picture. The Secret Service has the capability of kind of building cases on people, but as far as local police, I mean, they can't really do
much about it, you know? Knoxville has a lot of
dealers from out of town. Basically, drugs are more
expensive in Knoxville than they are in Detroit or
Chicago or Cleveland or Atlanta, so a lot of people kind of
go to these mid-level cities to sell their drugs
because they're, you know, you can get a brick in
Detroit for, like, $25,000 and then cut it and go sell it for $100,000 in Knoxville. I was addicted to drugs at the time, so a lot of it was buying
drugs with the bills. A few dealers I was honest
with and I would say, "This is what I do." And I ended up selling some bills to a drug dealer from Cleveland, but there was a couple
cases of, I would buy drugs from these people with
the counterfeit money. And the guy that actually
ended up setting me up, I probably got him for close to $10,000 over about a month's period. And he said that it was raining one day and one of my bills got wet and the color-shifting makeup smeared off. So he found out that they were fake. He was just kind of impressed and wanted to start buying them from me. These people would drive
from Knoxville up to Detroit to buy a brick of heroin, and they would mix in $5,000
or $10,000 of my bills when they went to their city to re-up. All different stores have
their specific method of detecting counterfeit bills, and a lot of the big retailers just use the counterfeit pens. So they typically just mark the bill, and then if it marks
properly, they cash it. If someone's buying a real
cheap item with a $100 bill, that's probably more reason
to take a closer look at it. Like, looking for the
strip and the watermark, holding the bill up to the light helps. Really, the best way to
tell if a bill's real is putting it in a bill validator. This is the more modern
blue-note $100 bill. If you hold the bill at a
certain angle and shift it, the ink turns from a
metallic green to a copper. It's used with magnetic ink, so if you fold the bill in
half and set it on the table, you can actually lift it
up with a neodymium magnet. There's enough magnetism to actually lift the bill up off the table. So, some cashiers will scratch the shirt to feel a kind of rigid
texture in the bill. The bills are printed on an intaglio press that kind of raises the
ink above the paper, which gives it a certain type of texture. Bills are really hard. There's kind of a real
crisp feeling to it. Well, yeah, there is a smell to money, and my bills, I've had a couple people, if I sprayed the matte lacquer too soon to spending it,
you know what I mean, a couple people would complain of a smell. I mean, they always accepted the bills because really, every security feature that a cashier would
look for, my bills had. So even if they were kind of suspicious or even brought up
something like the smell, they still accepted it because
there was really no reason to believe it was counterfeit. It was 2019. The dealer from Cleveland,
he got arrested up there. He either got caught with my
counterfeit money or heroin, and it didn't take him
long to inform on me. And then from there, the Secret Service raided my hotel room. I was in the process of printing when they kicked the door in, so they found computers and printers, and I think I had, like,
$6,400 in counterfeit bills that I tried to flush down the toilet. They pretty much caught me
red-handed at that point. I was basically looking
at about three years, but the Secret Service came to me and basically said that if I pleaded guilty and showed them how I did everything, then they wouldn't charge
my wife with anything and they would give me cooperation credit and they'd keep my restitution
amount under $100,000. So, with the cooperation, that got reduced to 10 to 16 months. The maximum sentence is 20 years. I think white-collar criminals
should still go to prison. I mean, I deserved to go to prison. I was lucky with the amount
of time that I served. It got me sober. Really, it was for the
best in my particular case. There are organizations in other countries that have taken a liking
to counterfeiting. It's obviously extremely profitable, and I've heard that a lot of counterfeits come out of Lima and Medellín. I've seen some bills
that I was told came from South America, but the
quality wasn't very good, I didn't think. It's criminal organizations
in the drug trade. And just from my experience, people who are in the drug trade, obviously, they're opportunists. If there's a way to make
money any other way, from my experience, they'll do it. There's a "supernote," they say, most likely coming out of North Korea produced by the North Korean government, that is indistinguishable
from legitimate currency. It supposedly has not only
all the security features, but all of them done pretty flawlessly. I started counterfeiting
when I was 19 years old. I read "The Art of Making Money," a book about Art Williams, who was a counterfeiter up in Chicago. And that kind of gave
me the original idea, but everything else was
kind of my own methods. The bills weren't super sophisticated, but they were good enough to sell. A friend of mine's dad was kind of a connected guy in Tampa, but then my friend overdosed and died. I basically just stopped doing it. You know, at that point I
didn't want to get caught. And of course, when I
started up again later on, it's all because of just a
desperate financial situation that kind of, you know,
I was racking my brain for any ways to make quick money. I don't think there will ever be a way to prevent counterfeiting. Even if it goes digital, there's still ways of
counterfeiting cashless — like, a person I know was
counterfeiting credit cards. The million or so dollars that I had made over my career hasn't impacted the
economy much, I would say. But maybe on the local level, it might make people lose trust in cash. In fact, a lot of stores in Knoxville don't accept $100 bills anymore. They've got little signs
at, like, Dollar Generals and certain stores that I frequented. Obviously, this whole situation kind of flipped my life upside down. I'm sure it wasn't easy on my kids. I had to go to prison. My wife and I are now separated. So, I mean, it's been rough on all of us. Now I am the production manager at a printing and graphics
company in Knoxville. So, yeah, still printing, just not, nothing illegal.
