Do not try this at home. — Dan

The city of Trois-Rivières, Quebec, sits on the confluence of — surprisingly, if you speak French — two rivers, the Saint-Maurice River and the Saint Lawrence. (Here’s a map.) The name comes from the fact that the Saint-Maurice has three mouths which feed into the Saint Lawrence, but that has little do with our story today. Trois-Rivière is home to about 130,000 people, and its proximity to the water means that Trois-Rivière is also home to a lot of jobs — its one of the oldest industrial cities in all of Canada.

That may be why François (Frank) Bourassa lived there — for a while, he had a job at a factory making brake pads for cars. But that is not what he wanted to do with his life. And by “that,” we mean “work.” Bourassa wanted money, he just wanted to make it another way: himself, and literally so. And that’s a goal he achieved — today, Frank Bourassa is in the record books as the world’s most prolific counterfeiter.

And all it cost him was six weeks behind bars, and about $1,000 of (real) money.

Frank Bourassa got his start in crime early in life. As PENGlobal reports, by the 15, he was expelled from school and found a job as a mechanic, but he couldn’t follow the straight-and-narrow, selling stolen cars as his side hustle. He’d ultimately give up the hot car biz and sold pot instead, which landed him behind bars for three months. Despite being Canadian, he preferred U.S. dollars — they’re accepted in most places, even outside the United States — and became fond of American currency. Already a criminal, he decided the easiest way to make more American dollars was to simply print his own. And as he approached his 40th birthday in 2010, he focused doing just that.

But Frank wasn’t some fly-by-night criminal. He understood that to make fake bills that passed as real, you needed to invest in your product. He spent more than $300,000, including a $125,000 printer, using the proceeds from his weed business. He found specifications for the security features on U.S. bills online — they’re hardly a secret, as legitimate businesses need to be able to recognize them — and was ready to get to work. All he needed as the paper — a blend of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen — that U.S. currency is printed on. That proved difficult, but not impossible; as a GQ reporter explained, “Frank shared with [the reporter that Frank, under using an alias pretending to be from a security firm called Keystone Investments], told his mark that Keystone was looking to print bond certificates on secure rag paper—customized with one or two security measures designed to, um, foil counterfeiters.” It worked. By late 2009, Frank Bourassa was in business.

And he printed more money than anyone had ever imagined. GQ continues: “Serious counterfeiters do not spend their money themselves but instead sell in bulk, and the going rate for a good bill, the Internet informed Frank, was 30 percent of face value. He reasoned that if he was going to put himself through the hassle and expense of buying supplies and so on, he should print enough in a single batch to leave himself set for life. He figured something in the $200 million range would suffice. It should be stated plainly that by the standards of most counterfeiters, printing $200-plus million is not going big—it is going insane.” Indeed, it’s an amount that got Frank recognized as the world’s largest counterfeiting operation by Guinness World Records.

Frank’s insanity may have gotten him caught, but it also bought his freedom. About a year after Frank’s operation began printing and selling fake bills, someone in law enforcement noticed. The quality of the fakes were very, very high — the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would later state that the “notes were virtually undetectable to the naked eye. Some of the features they had were rather uncommon in this criminal industry, including the type of paper used, that was especially made with a Jackson watermark and a dark vertical stripe imitating the security thread found in authentic notes.” So it took the RCMP a while, but ultimately, they caught Bourassa, charging him with production, possession and distribution of counterfeit currency, per the CBC. And they had him dead to rights. Bourassa was looking at a very long prison sentence.

But the authorities had a problem: Bourassa claimed to have printed more than $200 million, as noted above — and they cops had only found a few million of that. Somewhere, he claimed, there was a stash of fake nine to ten million $20 bills. And the authorities wanted to get their hands on that “money” before anyone else did. After spending six weeks behind bars, Frank struck a deal. As Business Insider reported, “In exchange for the $200 million in counterfeit notes and the offset printing press, which Frank says ‘would have ended up somewhere flooding the streets of the US eventually,’ Frank was let free. Frank was ordered to pay a fine of 1,350 Canadian dollars for the drugs found in his car during the raid.”

On March 27, 2014, all charges against Frank Bourassa were dropped, and he was a free man. But he likely wasn’t a poor one. Bourassa probably didn’t print $200 million in twenties — he probably printed closer to $250 million. Some, perhaps most, of that is included in what he sold before he was caught. (And if he sold it for 30% of face value, that’s $15 million of real money.) Either way, he also has a career for himself — and a legit one at that. Now, he works as a security consultant for governments, specializing in — no surprise here — anticounterfeiting.

Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.

Join for free today!

Today’s Bonus fact: If you get your cash from a legitimate place — say, a bank — the cash itself may not be legitimate. That’s what a New Jersey man named William Hagman learned in 2012. As NJ.com reported, Hagman had accounts at both TD Bank and Bank of America, and wanted to transfer $2,500 from one to the other. So he went to the former, withdrew the cash, then drove to the nearby BoA. When he went to deposit the newly-acquired cash, he told the press, “[the teller] took the cash and the deposit slip and proceeded to process the cash in an automated counter. She turned to me and notified me that one of the $100 bills was counterfeit.” Hagman didn’t suffer any criminal penalties for this, but he did end up down $100 bucks. Per the press report, “Hagman said the supervisor [at the first bank] was full of apologies, but she said bank policy wouldn’t permit it. When a customer leaves the branch with cash, the cash becomes property of the customer, Hagman said he was told.”

From the Archives: The Counterfeit Money Which is Intentionally Worthless: It’s a really neat idea.

Now I Know is supported by readers like you. Yes, you! Many of my readers donate a few dollars a month to help Now I Know grow and thrive. And in exchange, they get an ad-free version!

Interested in supporting Now I Know? Click here!

And thanks! — Dan