History Main / CounterfeitCash

* At least two episodes of MarriedWithChildren feature the issue of counterfeit money. In one of them, Al and Griff blackmailed their boss. Because Al doesn't believe there are $100 bills, he thought she tried to trick him with fake money. In another one, Al tried to bribe Bud with Xeroxed bills and even moaned that each copy costed him eight cents. When Bud asked him about the original bill, Al realized he left it [[CrowningMomentOfFunny IN THE COPYMAKER]]

* In HayaoMiyazaki's LupinIII film ''{{The Castle of Cagliostro}}'', the {{MacGuffin}} was a counterfeiting set-up reputed to be so good that its output was indistinguishable from the real thing.

* In ''GoodOmens'', when one printer tells another that the current fad for books of prophecies is "a licence to print money", a footnote adds that the second printer's own thoughts on that subject eventually led to his arrest.

* In one episode of ''{{Malcolm In The Middle}}'', Malcolm finds out that his neighbors set up a block party in celebration of their annual vacation, which obviously upsets him. So he desperately tries to go around doing good deeds to help make his family (or at least him) less despicable. Sadly, he inadvertently helps someone else [[NiceJobBreakingItHero steal his neighbors belongings]]. However, when the police arrive, he uses his eidetic memory to recite all the things that were stolen... which happen to materials for printing money, which he quickly realizes.

* Fredric Brown's short story "Don't Look Behind You". A man with a gift for printing is recruited to make plates to print counterfeit money.

* ''{{Bottom}}'' had an episode featuring the production of genuine £27 notes, "Welsh money" (triangular), and the infamous line "That's not the queen, it's Danny La Rue!" "Well, it's ''a'' queen..."

* [[http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/little-old-moneymaker/9282/ Emerich Juettner]] got away with counterfeiting for a decade (from 1937 to 1947) despite the poor quality of his fakes (printed on ordinary paper, with badly reproduced graphics and Washington's name misspelled) because he printed only modest amounts of fake money and because people rarely pay much attention to one-dollar bills. (Even when people did notice, they often preferred to keep the bogus bill as a souvenir rather than report it). He finally got caught when there was a fire in his apartment and his equipment got tossed into the street by the firemen.

* During one sequence in ''Big Money Hustlas'', the counterfeiter Bootleg Greg tries to pay his tithe to the crimelord Big Baby Sweets with counterfeit bills. Sweets's bodyguard kills him and flips his bills over - they're only printed on one side.

* There was a case where a man was arrested after [[TooDumbToLive trying to pay with two $7 bills.]]

* A non-cash variety appears in a story arc of ''RockyAndBullwinkle'', Boris and Natasha are mass-producing counterfeit boxtops. The two spend on goods in every store that can be traded in for boxtops and crippling the economy. This arc had to be cut short due to complaints from GeneralMills, which was sponsoring the show.

* One episode of DarkwingDuck featured Bushroot developing a [[GrowsOnTrees money tree]] that grew counterfeit bills. In addition, when the bills were placed into vaults, they would sprout into vines and carry the safes full of real bills back to Bushroot.

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* One issue of ''Dragon Magazine'' included a "Top Secret" scenario in which the PCs need to infiltrate an underwater base and stop a counterfeiting plot. Promptly averted when they learn that someone dropped the plates, leaving an obvious crack across them and making them useless. (That someone is being tortured to death in the airlock when the PCs arrive.)

* There was a case where a man was arrested after trying to pay with two $7 bills.

* A Canadian teenager and his friends made a fortune producing counterfeit $100 bills. They made so many of them, in fact, that many retail outlets in Canada will no longer accept older $100 bills.

* In the opening scenes of ''In the Line of Fire'', US Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan (ClintEastwood) and his partner are busting a counterfeiter group. In RealLife, as a part of the Treasury Department the Secret Service also handles financial fraud issues, as well as the protection service that's the focus of most of the film.

* In an interesting inversion, a Swedish artist coined nine 10 SEK (a bit more than 1 USD) coins, that are normally made from some gold-coloured alloy, of pure cold, marked them with an almost invisible mark, and put them into circulation.

*As mentioned in the FunnyMoney trope, conterfeiting was endemic during the Russian Civil War. The Karenki Ruble banknotes made by the provisional government were of such laughably poor quality that anyone with a storebought home printing aparatus could make indistinguishable copies. And they did. This devalued the currency so badly that both the counterfeiters and the mints didn't bother to cut them into individual banknotes and released them as 1x1 metre sheets to save time.
*As in the aforementioned ''TheCounterfeiters'', releasing counterfeit money into an enemy country to undermine its economy is a popular war tactic. The most infamous example would probably be during TheAmericanCivilWar, where the Union flooded the south with millions in bogus Confederate cash. Whether this worked or not is debateable. Most of the fake bills were instantly recognizable because they looked ''too good'', but many retailers still accepted them because the Confederate Dollar was already FunnyMoney, anyway.

* BusterKeaton's character in ''TheHauntedHouse'' runs afoul of counterfeiters.

* Counterfeit Money is a frequent problem in China. However, only higher-value notes tend to be counterfeited. This results with an odd situation where the ''jiao'' (RMB equivalent of cents) notes are much lower in quality than the ''yuan'' notes, their texture almost resembling counterfeited money. The idea is that the ''jiao'' are worth so little that nobody would bother counterfeiting them anyway.