from Hacker News

The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)

by AlexeyMK on 9/13/23, 12:34 AM with 30 comments

• by svat on 9/13/23, 5:26 PM

  Awesome story! And all this before 28…

  Though not a contender for “greatest counterfeiter”, there is also William Chaloner (1650–1699), who had a similar idea (“the safest place from which to pass his money was the Mint itself”), and did battle with Sir Isaac Newton. There's a great book about this called Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson; I wrote a blog post about it some years ago, with the subtitle “What happens when Newton’s laws are violated”: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/dont-mess-with-a... (aside: the free wordpress.com hosting injects lots of ads these days sadly)

• by WalterBright on 9/14/23, 3:15 AM

  My favorite story is that of Jose Beraha Zdravko. He counterfeited the British gold sovereign, and his genius was putting more gold in them than the originals. His "Beraha Sovereigns" fetched a higher price than the official sovereign, more than the value of the extra gold.

  Tired of this humiliation, the British tried him for counterfeiting. He countered that only legal tender could be counterfeited, and sovereigns were no longer legal tender. He won the case.

  "Money of their Own" by Murray Teigh Bloom

• by charlierguo on 9/13/23, 5:47 PM

  Oh wow, crazy to see this on the front page! Author here.

  Shameless plug: if you like my writing, I mostly write about AI these days: https://www.ignorance.ai/

• by sam_goody on 9/13/23, 9:00 PM

  The Israeli one shekel coin was counterfeited so much that it was more common than the real coin.

  When they caught the counterfeiter, he was let off on a technicality (his coins were not an exact copy - they were missing a dot, and they were not magnetic while the real coin was), but the coins were so common they were accepted as legal tender.

  (At the time people said that the counterfeiter was fined so much he had to keep the presses running all night.)

• by thisisauserid on 9/13/23, 7:14 PM

  Greatest counterfeiter... we know of!

• by CliffStoll on 9/14/23, 12:26 AM

  Terrific book: The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Bloom. Tells the details and how he did it. Fun read!

• by at-fates-hands on 9/13/23, 5:48 PM

  One of the best lines from the story:

  "These four made it rain so hard it created a noticeable boom in the Portuguese economy."

  Which highlights to issue with counterfeit money - its pretty easy to create, but then the hard part is laundering it.

  The whole story is just staggering to think they got away with it for so long.

• by nullc on 9/13/23, 10:18 PM

  I wonder how many people knew all along what was going on there but couldn't get anyone to care?

• by m3kw9 on 9/13/23, 5:41 PM

  this story could be used to teach some macroeconomics lessons. There’s direct stimulus causing a boom(bills printed) because they spend it so fast, lending at 0 interest, and how directly a countries faith in their money can cause a devaluation

• by Nifty3929 on 9/13/23, 5:34 PM

  Covered briefly in an entertaining book called "Lying for Money" which is all about various forms of fraud and how they work, with real life examples as demonstrations. It's a very entertaining read!

• by gweinberg on 9/13/23, 11:54 PM

  "How much money did they print? 100 million escudos, which at the time was 0.88% of Portugal’s GDP. Today, it would be worth 150 billion dollars."

  No it wouldn't. Probably an off by factor of 1000 error.

• by gumby on 9/13/23, 6:10 PM

  The photos in the article appear to be of legit notes, as I searched for the word "Angola" without success (they were able to explain away the fraud to the printer by pointing this out).

• by matanyall on 9/13/23, 4:55 PM

  That's wild! Feels similar to some of the crypto scams going around wrt stable coins.