History Main / StageMoney

* During the Victorian era, forging a banknote carried a hefty sentence, but making something that looked a bit like a banknote didn't. So forgers would create notes that read "Bank of Engraving" instead of "Bank of England", and could try to pass these off as real currency.
** Modern anti-counterfeiting laws no longer follow this limited definition of "forging" but instead focus on whether or not the "currency" is likely to fool a person into believing it's real. In court, the fact that a person was fooled into believing that fake notes were real would be taken to be evidence that the notes are counterfeit and illegal, regardless of any minor differences between the fakes and the real thing.
** Additionally, even passing off fake currency as the real thing is generally illegal, regardless of how transparently fake the forged notes may appear to be. After all, the person receiving the notes may be a visitor from another country and therefore unfamiliar with what local money looks like.
* A related trick in real life: the "carnie roll", a roll of what appears to be high-denomination bills. The first and last ones are high-denomination bills, though all of the ones in-between are $1 bills.
** This trick is difficult to pull off successfully with currency from countries such as Australia, England and Canada (to name just three) because the different denominations are not only slightly different sizes, but also different colours.

It isn't legal for print media to use real money, to the point that boxers with accurately sized money on it were once seized. So the magazine ad would show part of a hundred dollar bill, but not ''all'' of it. Because the law says that only the government can ''print'' money. There is no law against showing it on TV or in the movies, since you can't cut out the bills and use them.