Avoiding being busted with fake banknotes

When banks and businesses around the nation’s capital find counterfeit dollar bills, they send it to the Washington field office of the U.S. Secret Service. One morning in May 2020, agent Adam Gaab entered its inventory room, a space filled with money counters, microscopes, ultraviolet lights, and other tools, and saw that a fresh batch of bills had just arrived.

With jet-black hair and a baby face, Gaab, at 28, was one of the younger agents in the Secret Service. He’d dreamed of a career in law enforcement since high school and was working as a Supreme Court police officer when the agency hired him in 2018. Gaab found the job fascinating and diverse—one day he was chasing fraud artists and the next he was guarding the president. By 2020 he’d participated in dozens of counterfeiting investigations, and as he pulled about 30 of the new $100 bills from a cabinet, he recognized them immediately.

They were crisp and lushly green, with the right kinds of serial numbers and even a perfectly simulated watermark. The bills were from a family of counterfeits that had bedeviled agents more than any other, with at least $50 million worth recovered around the world since 1999. Agents called them the Russian-Israeli notes. This particular variation, with “77” stamped in the lower right corner and a set of subtle errors—smudged chevrons, an extra line under one “THE”—was catalogued as Secret Service Circular 23332. It was so common and so good, agents referred to it as the No. 1 note. Gaab selected a specimen and thumbed it, feeling how two sheets of paper had been glued together to mimic the cottony thickness of a genuine bill.

counterfeit bills
A stack of fake bills confiscated in Cherry Hill, N.J.
Source: U.S. Secret Service
Taking the bills and their paperwork to his desk, Gaab began the routine of phoning the businesses in the area that had turned them over. None of the dozens of such calls he’d made over the previous months had turned up any leads. Today, though, an unusually thoughtful manager at a LoanMax in Northern Virginia identified a 44-year-old man who’d used four fake $100s to pay off the loan on his Dodge Durango. The man—the Secret Service asked Bloomberg Businessweek to withhold his name—had listed his job as the driver of a hospital laundry truck. A few days later, Gaab drove by the man’s house. With two Mercedes and a BMW in the driveway, it was a pretty tony place for a truck driver.

Over the next nine months, Gaab tracked other notes to local retailers and watched endless loops of security footage. One video showed the laundry driver’s wife handing a bad $100 note to a cashier. Another showed them both passing bills to a clerk at a Walmart. In February 2013, Gaab and local police raided the couple’s house. Gaab sat down with the man in his living room and used the video as leverage: Talk, or your wife goes to jail, too.

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