This 1930s counterfeiter had the Secret Service stumped for nearly a decade.

As long as humans have traded cash for goods and services, there has been a smaller, sneakier subset of schemers in the background, deciding it’d be easier to fake the stuff than to work hard and long enough to earn it cleanly. 

Counterfeiting is far from a dead trade. An estimated $220 million of fake money was in circulation in the U.S. in 2012. And counterfeiters continue to pop up in all shapes and sizes: Earlier this year, a library in Massachusetts reported a surge of people trying to pay their overdue fees with tokens from Chuck E. Cheese. (Hey, you can’t knock the hustle.) But in the annals of counterfeiting, one of the weirdest stories in American history also happens to be one of its most infamous.

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