Jeff Turner counterfeited over $1 million in US currency. He forged the 1996-series $100 bill and later the 2013 "blue note." He was indicted on federal conspiracy charges in 2019 and cooperated with the Secret Service, eventually serving 10 months in prison. According to Turner, the Secret Service said the bills he was manufacturing were the highest quality they'd seen in over 25 years.
Turner speaks to Insider about the materials and processes required to make fake money. He talks through how to spot a fake bank note. He also discusses cartel forgeries and the "supernotes" the US has accused North Korea of making.
Nowadays, Turner works as a printer in Knoxville, Tennessee. He speaks about spotting fakes and frauds on his YouTube channel.
Turner speaks to Insider about the materials and processes required to make fake money. He talks through how to spot a fake bank note. He also discusses cartel forgeries and the "supernotes" the US has accused North Korea of making.
Nowadays, Turner works as a printer in Knoxville, Tennessee. He speaks about spotting fakes and frauds on his YouTube channel.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 My name's Jeff Turner.
00:02 I printed over a million dollars in U.S. banknotes.
00:05 And this is how crime works.
00:07 I've been called the Picasso of counterfeiting.
00:12 From my perspective, it wasn't that hard to do it, if that makes sense.
00:17 It just took a lot of trial and error, basically.
00:20 The bills just progressively got better and better until eventually got caught
00:24 and the Secret Service said the bills I was making were the best they've seen in 25 years.
00:30 [Motor]
00:35 I started counterfeiting when I kind of found myself in a desperate financial situation.
00:42 I wrecked a work truck, so I lost my job.
00:46 And, you know, I had a newborn baby at home.
00:48 The lease was up in our house.
00:50 So I was just kind of, you know, in a desperate spot.
00:55 I was just trying to think of some way to get my family back on their feet, you know.
01:01 And counterfeiting just ended up being, like, the safest, easiest way.
01:05 The majority of the money I printed was the '96 series $100 bill.
01:10 I also counterfeited some of the 2013, the new Blue Notes,
01:13 but really that was more of, like, a hobby for me, like, just kind of a challenge.
01:18 The longest process to start counterfeiting was making the digital files.
01:23 I would say I spent two months of just editing these images.
01:28 Really, Wikipedia has pretty high-resolution photos in their stock.
01:34 And I broke the image down to multiple layers.
01:37 So I would have one image of just the background color.
01:41 I'd jumble up the serial numbers.
01:43 I knew I needed to find a real thin paper that was opaque enough
01:48 to where you couldn't see the strip and watermark through the face of the bill.
01:52 I went through rice paper, vellum paper, tracing paper, you know,
01:57 toilet paper, wrappers on toilet paper.
02:00 I ended up finding that Bible paper was perfect.
02:04 Bible paper glows a dull purple just like money does.
02:07 I would acquire the Bible paper by going into, like, bookstores
02:11 and just kind of taking out the blank pages.
02:13 Inevitably, I ran out of bookstores in Knoxville.
02:17 I would coat the bills with a matte lacquer spray can,
02:21 which basically enabled the counterfeit detection pens to mark yellow.
02:26 I would also use an invisible ink UV pen to draw an invisible line over the strip.
02:34 I also found a certain type of iridescent green eye shadow
02:38 that I would basically paint on to the 100 in the bottom corner
02:43 to kind of replicate the color-shifting ink.
02:46 One cashier would run her fingernail along Benjamin Franklin's shirt
02:50 to kind of feel the rigid texture.
02:53 I ended up going to, like, a Hobby Lobby, and I found a, like, a fine-tip glue pen.
02:59 It would dry and give a little texture to his shirt.
03:03 The 3-D security ribbon on the modern $100 bill was hard to crack.
03:09 The Bureau of Engraving and Printing kind of outsources a company
03:14 to produce the paper and some of the security features,
03:17 and I was able to find the patent rights, so it basically explained how to do it.
03:22 The trial and error was definitely frustrating.
03:25 When I first started counterfeiting, you know, I would just experiment,
03:30 and I'd mess up five for every one that I made well.
03:34 Towards the end, I could make a perfect counterfeit $100 bill
03:38 in probably five or ten minutes.
03:40 [whirring]
03:45 I've had a few printers kind of break on me.
03:48 Sometimes the paper would just get so jammed up.
03:51 It's not so much noisy because I'm using digital printers,
03:54 but the matte lacquer spray smells really bad.
04:00 So a lot of times, like, maids at hotels would come into my room
04:04 and thinking we're, like, huffing paint or, like, something I'd have to say,
04:08 "Oh, my wife spilled nail polish," or, you know, just make up these little lies.
04:12 But eventually I rented a house, and I had ventilation fans
04:16 that would suck the matte lacquer out the window,
04:19 so I could kind of spray the bills in front of this exhaust fan
04:24 that it kind of sucked it out the window.
04:26 There weren't really, like, big stockpiles of counterfeit money.
04:30 I would try to, like, essentially launder the money every day, you know,
04:35 so I'd print maybe $2,000, $5,000 in the morning and early afternoon,
04:41 and then I'd try to break all those bills before the end of the night.
04:44 [whirring]
04:50 There was probably, like, 10 or 20 of, like, the big corporations--
04:55 retail, grocery stores, you know, Walmart-type stores--
04:59 and those were the best to break the bills at.
05:02 I also sold bills to people.
05:04 $0.25 on the dollar was kind of the going rate.
05:07 If I was breaking a bill in a store, I would try to go to female cashiers,
05:12 and if I sent women in with the bills, I would tell them to go to male cashiers.
05:16 When I would break a bill, I'd give them the exact coinage
05:20 to kind of distract them a little bit.
05:22 The majority of your amateur-type counterfeiters
05:25 get kind of called out at the register,
05:28 and, you know, they'll get a license plate number or something.
05:31 And I would, like, always park my car far away
05:34 so they could never get my license plate.
05:37 I steered away from self-checkout machines
05:40 because they were just too hard to beat.
05:42 Some of them even have, like, photographic software
05:45 where it just analyzes, like, the micro-printing and all that stuff.
05:49 In the beginning, I was definitely nervous
05:52 because I spent so much time, you know, perfecting these bills
05:56 that I would notice any little, you know, error or anything like that.
06:01 I think I've gotten attention to detail that most people probably don't have.
06:05 And, you know, the knowledge I have for the security features,
06:08 I study extensively.
06:10 There was a few times that I would go to the same grocery store,
06:15 and it turns out that the bills I'd spent last week,
06:18 they found out about them.
06:20 But really, most of the time, when a cashier--
06:23 even if the cashier kind of knows it's fake,
06:26 they usually give it back to you.
06:28 Over the two years that I was counterfeiting,
06:31 I probably only had, like, maybe three or four cashiers turn me down.
06:35 And I was spending, you know, thousands of dollars every day.
06:39 Luckily for me, they only had, I think, like, 12 surveillance videos of me.
06:45 So I was pretty good about kind of staying anonymous.
06:48 There was a "be on the lookout" for me and my wife
06:52 breaking a bill at a specific store.
06:54 They didn't know my name, though. It was just a picture.
06:57 The Secret Service has the capability of kind of building cases on people,
07:01 but as far as local police, I mean, they can't really do much about it, you know.
07:06 [whirring]
07:12 Knoxville has a lot of dealers from out of town.
07:16 Basically, drugs are more expensive in Knoxville
07:18 than they are in Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland or Atlanta.
07:23 So a lot of people kind of go to these mid-level cities to sell their drugs
07:27 because, you know, you can get a brick in Detroit for, like, $25,000
07:32 and then cut it and go sell it for, you know, $100,000 in Knoxville.
07:38 I was addicted to drugs at the time,
07:41 so a lot of it was buying drugs with the bills.
07:45 A few dealers I was honest with, and I would say, "This is what I do,"
07:49 and I ended up selling some bills to a drug dealer from Cleveland.
07:53 But there was a couple cases of I would buy drugs from these people
07:58 with the counterfeit money, and the guy that actually ended up setting me up,
08:04 I probably got him for, like, close to $10,000 over about a month's period.
08:11 And he said that it was raining one day, and one of my bills got wet,
08:15 and the color-shifting makeup smeared off.
08:19 So he found out that they were fake.
08:22 He was just kind of impressed and, you know, wanted to start buying them from me.
08:26 These people would drive from Knoxville up to Detroit to buy, like, a brick of heroin,
08:32 and they would mix in, like, $5,000 or $10,000 of my bills
08:35 when they went to their city to re-up.
08:44 All different stores have their specific method of detecting counterfeit bills.
08:50 And a lot of, like, the big retailers just use the counterfeit pens.
08:54 So they typically just mark the bill, and then, you know, if it marks properly, they cash it.
09:00 If someone's buying a real cheap item with a $100 bill,
09:03 that's probably more reason to take a closer look at it.
09:06 Like, looking for the strip and the watermark, you know, holding the bill up to the light,
09:12 helps. Really the best way to tell if a bill's real is, like, putting it in a bill validator.
09:19 This is the more modern Blue Note $100 bill.
09:24 If you hold the bill at a certain angle and shift it,
09:27 the ink turns from a metallic green to a copper.
09:31 It's used with magnetic ink.
09:33 So if you fold the bill in half and set it on the table,
09:38 you can actually lift it up with a neodymium magnet.
09:41 There's enough magnetism to actually lift the bill up off the table.
09:45 So some cashiers will scratch the shirt to feel a kind of rigid texture in the bill.
09:51 The bills are printed on an intaglio press that kind of raises the ink above the paper,
09:57 which gives it a certain type of texture.
10:00 Bills are really hard.
10:02 There's kind of like a real crisp feeling to it.
10:06 Well, yeah, there is a smell to money.
10:09 And my bills, I've had a couple people, if I sprayed the matte lacquer,
10:15 like, too soon to spending it, you know what I mean?
10:17 Like, a couple people would complain of a smell.
10:20 I mean, they always accepted the bills because, really, like,
10:24 every security feature that a cashier would look for, my bills had.
10:29 So even if they were kind of suspicious or even brought up something like the smell,
10:34 you know, they still accepted it because there was really no reason to believe it was counterfeit.
10:39 It was 2019.
10:46 The dealer from Cleveland, he got arrested up there.
10:49 He either got caught with my counterfeit money or heroin.
10:53 And, you know, it didn't take him long to inform on me.
10:57 And then from there, you know, the Secret Service raided my hotel room.
11:01 I was in the process of printing when they kicked the door in.
11:05 So they found computers and printers, and I think I had like 6,400 in counterfeit bills
11:12 that I tried to flush down the toilet.
11:15 They pretty much caught me red-handed at that point.
11:18 I was basically looking at, like, about three years.
11:21 But the Secret Service came to me and basically said that if I pleaded guilty
11:29 and showed them how I did everything, then they wouldn't charge my wife with anything
11:35 and they would give me cooperation credit and they'd keep my restitution amount under $100,000.
11:43 So with the cooperation, that got reduced to 10 to 16 months.
11:50 The maximum sentence is 20 years.
11:53 I think, you know, white-collar criminals should still go to prison.
11:57 I mean, I deserve to go, you know, to prison.
11:59 I was lucky with the amount of time that I served.
12:03 It got me sober.
12:04 Really, it was for the best in my particular case.
12:07 There are organizations in other countries, you know, that have taken a liking to counterfeiting.
12:19 It's obviously extremely profitable.
12:21 And, you know, I've heard that a lot of counterfeits come out of Lima and Medellin.
12:27 I've seen some bills that I was told came from, like, South America,
12:32 but the quality wasn't very good, I didn't think.
12:36 It's criminal organizations in the drug trade.
12:39 And just like from my experience, you know, people who were in the drug trade,
12:43 obviously they're opportunists, you know.
12:46 If there's a way to make money any other way, from my experience, you know, they'll do it.
12:52 There's a super note, they say, most likely coming out of North Korea,
12:57 produced by the North Korean government, that is indistinguishable from a legitimate currency.
13:02 It supposedly has not only all the security features, but all of them done pretty flawlessly.
13:14 I started counterfeiting when I was 19 years old.
13:17 I read The Art of Making Money, a book about Art Williams, who was a counterfeiter up in Chicago.
13:23 And that kind of gave me the original idea.
13:27 But everything else was kind of like my own methods.
13:30 The bills weren't super sophisticated, but they were good enough to sell.
13:35 A friend of mine's dad was kind of like a connected guy in Tampa.
13:41 But then my friend overdosed and died.
13:45 I basically just stopped doing it.
13:47 You know, at that point I didn't want to get caught.
13:50 And of course when I started up again later on, it's all because of, you know,
13:56 just a desperate financial situation that kind of, you know,
14:00 I was racking my brain for any ways to make quick money.
14:04 I don't think, you know, there will ever be a way to prevent counterfeiting.
14:09 You know, even if it goes digital, there's still ways of counterfeiting cashless.
14:16 Like a person I know was counterfeiting credit cards.
14:19 The million or so dollars that I had made over my career hasn't impacted the economy much, I would say.
14:29 But, you know, maybe on like the local level it might make people lose trust in cash.
14:36 In fact, a lot of stores in Knoxville don't accept $100 bills anymore.
14:40 They've got little signs at like Dollar General's and certain stores that I frequented.
14:46 Obviously, you know, this whole situation kind of flipped my life upside down.
14:53 You know, I'm sure it wasn't easy on my kids.
14:56 You know, I had to go to prison.
14:59 My wife and I are now separated.
15:01 So, I mean, it's been, you know, rough on all of us.
15:07 Now I am the production manager at a printing and graphics company in Knoxville.
15:13 So, yeah, just still printing.
15:16 Just not--nothing illegal.
15:19 [ Silence ]