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.