An acquaintance of mine thought he found twenty dollars American on the ground the other day, only it turned out he wasn’t that lucky. It was a counterfeit, and a pretty obvious one at that. I was curious to see it because I’d never knowingly seen a counterfeit bill before. The most obvious tell is that it feels too smooth. I’m pretty sure it’s just standard computer paper it’s printed on.
It’s got some other tells, too. For one thing, the serial number is written in Cyrillic. The “backwards N” stands out. I told some friends on twitter about this, and someone who is more knowledgable than I am pointed out that the serial number is actually the Russian word for souvenir—“сувенир.” It’s repeated three times on the bill, twice with “JB44” in front of it. Also, underneath the picture of the White House, where a legit twenty reads “The White House,” this one says, “Donestk City.” Curious. Also, it says “Cruger” under the portrait of Andrew Jackson.
The souvenir thing made me wonder if this was originally from some Russian tourist attraction—some gaudy America Land or something. Or maybe it’s just some sort of toy money you’d give kids to play with. But then the Donetsk City bit made me wonder if this was some sort of agitprop, a pro-Russian jab at America’s funding of the Ukrainian military. Cruger could be anything, I guess. Someone’s username online. After some googling I came across Bernhard Krüger, a Nazi who ran a counterfeiting operation out of a concentration camp, producing British pound notes in massive quantities. After the war, Krüger was picked up and put to work as a document forger by the French.
I googled the serial number (or rather it’s approximation in the latin alphabet, “JB44CYBEHNP”), and got a bunch of local news stories from across North America, police warning people about these counterfeits being used, sometimes making arrests. This CBC story out of Charlottetown is fairly representative.1 I found stories reporting copies of this exact counterfeit banknote showing up in small town Ontario, Houston, Missouri, Florida, and Buneos Aires. The stories predate the war between Russia and Ukraine, for whatever that’s worth.
I also found a kind of sketchy-looking online store based in Ukrainian that sells these notes as souvenir money. A google translation of the listing says they're, “Perfect for any festive event (sorcery, birthday, themed parties...). Also widely used in needlework and floristry.” I don’t know if the store is the source of these notes, it seemed maybe like something third party or autogenerated the way Amazon’s listings sometimes are. Although if you zoom in on the image it’s the exact same, and you can also buy other denominations of American currency as well as “souvenir” euros. Otherwise, the store mostly sells craft supplies. I suppose someone can probably just download a template of the note somewhere online and try printing it off themselves. Still, I’m curious about who designed the note and what their plan was. I feel like I’ve stumbled onto something esoteric and meant to stay hidden from the mundane world.
If you have any insight or speculation about these notes, I’d love to hear from you.
This counterfeiting business reminded me of the story of Frank Bourassa, a guy from Quebec who counterfeited notes of a much higher quality than the the one I saw—and he got away with it despite the RCMP and the Secret Service investigating him. He was profiled in a piece in GQ a few years back. It’s a long read but it’s a fascinating subject and worth your time.
In other #heistwatch news you’ve probably already heard about the massive cheese heist at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London (pairs well with the 50,000 litres of extra virgin olive oil stolen from a mill in Cordoba.)
Here’s a line from a Hari Kunzru column in Harper’s that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
In the center of the city, near the Capitoline Hill and the monstrous slab of wedding cake that is the Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, runs the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a wide and—by Roman standards—relatively undistinguished street, most notable in recent times as the site of the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party. Patrick Modiano stole its name for one of his melancholy novels about Paris and historical amnesia, but this original “street of dark shops” was dark, for at least part of its history, because of smoke and soot. In the eighth and ninth centuries, it was the site of a kiln in which monuments were broken up and burned to make lime for mortar. The thought of workshops running for decade after decade, century after century, grinding up works of art and feeding them into ovens, induces a kind of sublime terror, a feeling of insignificance in the face of the past. So much has vanished, so much labor and human expression has turned to dust.
A short note on the election
I was going to write a bit about the election, but I don’t want to. Everything I could say feels a bit too obvious. I dunno, maybe it isn’t, but I also feel too bitter to write about it. I wrote on twitter that the Dems “beat and tear gassed everyone who cares and then wonder why the sociopaths won the election”. I guess that about sums it up. I don’t know.
I have some libs in my life who I feel bad for because I could see them getting excited that Trump was finally going away, but my gut kept telling me Harris wasn’t winning this one. I tried to warn them not to get their hopes up, but it didn’t do any good. I also know some MAGA-types, and that’s even more frustrating. You try to talk to them but they just go all dead eyed when you try to make your case, then they turn around and treat an anecdote they heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast as the gospel truth. But the worst of it is Gaza, where a year of full-throttle genocide has somehow managed to ramp up in recent weeks, inflicting even more suffering on innocent people.
It makes me feel hopeless. Here is some of the content I consume that’s either useful or makes me feel less hopeless sometimes. Not that it changes anything. I don’t know. Some of it will be familiar to you, but maybe you’ll find something new. I don’t know.
News and newsletters:
Unrigged aggregates a bunch of Canadian independent news sources. The New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. The Halifax Examiner for news from back home. The Progress Report and Jeremy Appel’s
, for news in Alberta. News From Nora by . ’s newsletter. ’s How Things Work, covering the American labor movement. For international politics, I always try to follow Sally Hayden and Gwynne Dyer, but they don’t seem to collect their writing in any one place. I read the NYRB, LRB, FT, and Jacobin, but I’m sure you’re familiar with these outlets already.Podcasts:
The War Nerd, for history, geopolitics, and literature. Chapo Trap House and True Anon, for American politics. The Adam Friedland Show, admittedly this one is just for laughs. Big Shiny Takes, the world’s only anti-free speech podcast. Sandy and Nora Talk Politics and The Daily News, for Canadian news. BBC’s In Our Time, for some perspective on it all. CBC’s Front Burner and As It Happens. Doug Henwood’s Behind the News. You Can’t Win by Tom and Don. Blowback.
I’m sure there’s plenty more that I’m forgetting, but the app is telling me I’m near the limit for links.
If you have any recommendations, let me know.
There seem to be a lot of stories about counterfeiting out of Prince Edward Island. Maybe it’s more tempting to try to pass off a fake note at a tourist destination?
Great post, counterfeiting is fascinating (like talented painters engaging in forgery). I used the Nazi counterfeiting operation as a plot device for a story published in Black Cat Weekly (that's a "for sale" mag), and the art forgery in a short for Apocalypse Confidential that's free to read: https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2023/04/13/signed-joey/ - I had fun with that one.