Pre-amble: I am not intending to purchase counterfeit currency, nor am I endorsing it - this whole post is one big thought experiment
Through extensive late-night random website-surfing, I recently came across the subject of counterfeit money and its availability on the dark web. In a nutshell…
- On the dark web, alongside drugs, guns and child pornography, apparently one can acquire counterfeit currency
- The ‘price ratio’ is about 1:4, meaning that $400 of counterfeit bills costs about $100 to buy.
- While scammers certainly exist, this is real and not just urban legend
- The quality of counterfeit currency is much better than it used to be, such that fake notes are unrecognisable to the standard employee in a shop/bar/wherever
- However, organisations that work with money for a living (i.e. banks, currency exchanges) will still catch them out and flag them.
(I shall refrain from sharing sources for the above, as I imagine there are Terms of Service here about providing links to the sorts of websites that I have been perusing. It’s all Google-able, though)
This got me to thinking… Let’s say that I wanted to work with counterfeit money for a living - i.e. my job is to launder counterfeit cash and turn it into real money that I can deposit in my bank and actually support myself and my family on. How would one go about this exactly?
The principle issue here is that I need to turn this physical counterfeit money into actual money in my bank account (as most life expenses these days cannot be paid with cash). I can’t deposit the fake money straight into the bank, so I’ll need to exchange it somehow for authentic cash. How? I could pay for things in shops, using large notes to pay for cheap items, pocketing the change. But I can’t keep doing that in the same establishments, as when they try to bank my fake money the bank will tell them and their suspicions will be raised.
I wonder if in-person gambling might work. I could go to a book-maker, place a series of bets on the favourite horses of each race, and pocket whatever winnings I make out of it. However, favourites don’t usually win - I’m not sure that would even turn a profit (plus I’d need to go to a different bookmaker each time).
Even if I did come up with a means of turning this into a full-time job, there’s still the question of what I’d tell the tax man. How would I explain my income? I’d have to concoct an elaborate fake business in order to account for things - itself a time-consuming business.
Perhaps another alternative - and a bit meta - is to sell the counterfeit currency to others in person, at a rate which guarantees me a margin. But how would I set up such an endeavour? And how would I guarantee freedom from law enforcement?
So, supporting myself entirely with counterfeit money sounds hard. How about using it to supplement my finances?
Well, I could pay for groceries etc. using the fake cash, but (again) I couldn’t keep going to the same places because suspicions would start to be raised. Shopping at a different supermarket each time could get tiresome and time-consuming.
I could buy drinks at bars and clubs with the money, but that’s only really a saving if I’d have been doing that anyway with real cash.
So, it seems to me that actually counterfeit cash isn’t very helpful - certainly not in terms of meaningfully improving one’s financial position. It might come in handy for the occasional bill at a restaurant or drink at a bar, but even then only very sporadically and in moderation. Am I missing something, though?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts…