The Man Who Printed $250 Million in Fake Twenties—and Walked Away with Six Weeks in Jail

Frank Bourassa was stopped at a red light when a strange question crossed his mind: "Why do we go to work? Why do we set up businesses? The end goal is to make money." When the light turned green, most people would have driven on and forgotten the thought. Frank didn't. "It was at that moment that I decided to start printing fake money."

What followed was not a small-time operation run from a basement printer. Bourassa, a Canadian high school dropout, built what investigators later described as one of the largest currency counterfeiting operations in North American history. Between 2008 and 2012, he printed $250 million worth of $20 bills so exact that trained professionals couldn't tell them apart. He ran the whole thing from a rented garage on a rural Quebec farm. And when he was caught, he used the remaining $200 million of fake money to buy his way out of jail—serving just six weeks before walking free. Today, he works as an anti-counterfeiting consultant for the same kinds of institutions he once swindled.

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