Darknet Diaries - 102: Money Maker

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Frank Bourassa had an idea. He was going to make money. Literally. Listen to the story of a master counterfeiter.

Frank Barasa is wired a certain way. I like things that are going to be challenging and difficult that just feed my mind and my brain. Frank thrives in complex situations that require tough problem solving. He needs this in his life, whether it's for work or play. He likes playing games that have high stakes, like either get rich or go to prison type of games, because games like these keep him engaged. If you fail, that makes it even more real. And those are the basic stuff that needs to be in there

to grab my interest. If I don't have that, I'm just not interested at all. He's been like this since he was a kid in school. School was a very boring place for me. They just take five hours explaining something that we can get in five minutes. You're just simmering in boredom, trying to learn things you're never going to use in your whole life. I don't know why you do that. It's so ridiculous.

He grew up in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada. It's a small city of about 130,000 people and a two-hour drive northeast from Montreal. Frank's in his 50s now, but he's going to take us back in time and tell us how he became one of the best criminal moneymakers in the world. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

I'm Jack Recider. This is Dark by Delete Me. I know a bit too much about how scam callers work. They'll use anything they can find about you online to try to get at your money. And our personal information is all over the place online. We'll see you next time. is a subscription service that finds and removes personal information from hundreds of data brokers websites and continuously works to keep it off. Data brokers hate them because Delete.me makes sure your personal profile is no longer theirs to sell. I tried it and they immediately got busy scouring the internet for my name and gave me reports on what they found. And then they got busy deleting things. It was great to have someone on my team when it comes to my privacy. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for Darknet Diaries

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is a teacher, and he's made it a mission to make Black Hills Information Security world-class in security training. You can learn things like penetration testing, securing the cloud, breaching the cloud, digital forensics, and so much more. But get this, the whole thing is pay what you can. Black Hills believes that great intro security classes do not need to be expensive, and they are trying to break down barriers to get more people into the security field. And if you decide to pay over $195, you get six months access to the MetaCTF Cyber Range, which is great for practicing your skills and showing them off to potential employers. Head on over to BlackHillsInfosec.com to learn more

about what services they offer and find links to their webcasts to get some world-class training. That's BlackHillsInfosec.com. BlackHillsInfosec.com. When Frank was in high school, he saw that some kids he knew were stealing clothes from stores and selling them to other kids at school. Well, they were moving quite a bit of stuff. He decided he wanted to be part of this too. If I can buy some of that and resell some of that, then, you know, it might be a penny for me in there somewhere. So as early as high school is where Frank started committing crimes. And you know what? It was going pretty good for a teenager.

It wasn't amazing, but it really opened his eyes. And he started thinking more like a criminal. But this led to him getting kicked out of high school. And from there, he got really into cars and eventually became an auto mechanic. And I really, really enjoyed that, too, because it was a lot to learn. And that was fun. It is food for brain. Once again, I got into the, you know, the classic phases. I got motorcycles and girls and stuff like that. And I devoted myself heavily to that.

He thrived in this environment, but he was a bit of a workaholic. He loved doing mechanic work so much that he started up his own garage, but then sold that to start up his own car part factory. We manufactured brake parts for cars. It was a complex business, and it checked all the boxes for things he liked doing. It was challenging, it made him think, and it expanded his skill set with cars and as a business person. Frank worked hard at running this factory. I was working 20 hours a day. I wasn't tired, so I didn't feel like I needed to sleep. I just enjoyed it so much.

It's very real and dynamic and rewarding. You're busy doing exactly what you want and you get to drive this thing where you want it to go. And if you do good, you succeed. But at some point during this new endeavor, Frank went criminal again. He was seeing that people in his town were making good money selling marijuana.

Some people I knew were dealing that a lot. And then I said, well, I'm going to apply, you know, kind of the same MO as I did, you know, in high school with the clothing stuff. So I said, you know, maybe I can, you know, buy some of you and then resell it. Now, when Frank finds something he really likes doing, he commits to it 100%. In fact, he overcommits. He was spending a crazy amount of hours at this factory. He saw that the more he worked, the more rewards there were. So he just spent as much time as humanly possible

making break paths for his company. But when he would focus entirely on that, it meant that other parts of his life were suffering. I literally burned myself out. I really did. And damn, did I crash. It all started one morning. I just woke up and I was dripping in sweat. I was shaking. I didn't know what the hell was happening. Frank was in bad shape.

He knew something wasn't right with his body. He couldn't even go to work, which was his favorite place that he loved going to the most. I was physically shaking like a leaf 24 hours a day. I was literally shaking. You can see with your own eyes. It was horrible. Instead of going to work, he went to the hospital.

Doctors pumping pouches left and right into me. Bunch of different vitamins and minerals and amino acids and stuff. That was out of everything. I drained myself out of a bunch of different stuff. And that wreaked havoc on me for a long time. He came home from the hospital more calm, but something changed inside him after this. The symptoms would sneak up on him a lot more often, like he would have trouble concentrating a lot. The brain is just on hyperdrive, just too much information, too short a time. You can't function properly. It's way, way too overwhelming. You think you're going to die because it's so

unreal how horrific an experience that is. So you can't make sense of it, which just amplifies the problem. There was a negative feedback loop. When he couldn't concentrate, he would get worried about his mental health. And this would make it worse. And he'd start to shake. And the shaking would make him worry even more. All this made him feel like he was headed towards a breaking point. You can't make left from right anymore.

It's very, very overwhelming, horrifically. This was Frank's life day in and day out, not knowing if tomorrow would be a normal day or one where he couldn't function at all. You just can't live like that. You have to figure this out. You have to fix it. Frank was determined to figure out what was going wrong with him. So he went to another doctor, but they didn't give him a good answer. So he scheduled an appointment for another doctor, but they didn't know exactly either. He kept making more appointments, but wasn't satisfied with what the doctors were telling him. At some point, he couldn't take it anymore. The shaking

and worrying was just too much, and it was too often. So he looked up the top doctor in his province and went straight to their office with no appointment or anything. I just walked straight into the hospital and I barged into his department and into his office. Frank says to the doctor, you're going to take care of me right now. You're going to tell me what I have right now. The doctor asked Frank about his symptoms and what he was worried about. I can't make sense of it. I think I'm worried about going insane. Is that how it feels like? The doctor talked it out with Frank and told him he wasn't going insane.

Instead, he was suffering from panic attacks and explained more about what that means. It matched with what I was experiencing and what I felt. The diagnosis was a breakthrough moment for Frank. Now he knew what was going on, which gave him something to focus on. So from this moment, I could put a target on this beast that was trying to hammer me down. I could put a name to it. And then I knew what it was.

Then I could go after it, which is exactly what I did. I researched everything about it, what to do, what could fix it, different therapies, different treatment, different drugs, different anything. And I beat the crap out of it until I kicked it out. This recovery process wasn't overnight. Frank sold the brake factory and took off on a much-needed vacation with his girlfriend. They spent some time in Europe, where Frank, who's a big fan of HBO's Band of Brothers, visited World War II battlefields. And after about two years of travel

and rest, Frank went back to Troyes, Rivière, Canada. He was ready to get a job again, but he didn't want to do something that was super demanding. Well, working every day, hours on end, wasn't it possibly, wasn't something I could do. It was hard for Frank to take it easy. He likes being immersed in work and being busy. And he also preferred working for himself and not for some boss. So he started a little side gig back up that he used to do. He went back to selling weed.

Oh, and just a little tidbit. This was around 2005. And since then, in 2018, Canada has completely legalized recreational marijuana. This grew really, really good and quick. So it was hugely successful at the time. It was the most successful anything I had done. Frank had connections with big-time dealers in another town and would buy big quantities from them and then sell smaller quantities locally. It was very lucrative for him, but it didn't last. Police busted a guy that Frank

was in cahoots with. Frank had sold him some weed and growing equipment, which led the cops back to Frank. In 2006, Frank was arrested on drug charges. He had to spend three months on house arrest from it. But being hit with something like this really gave him time to think about what his future would be. It was either going back to running a business, which I'd done before, and it led to burning myself out. But there was another idea taking shape in his head. He didn't mind doing illegal things, and he saw that certain illegal activities had big payoffs. So he started to think, what would be something he could do illegally

that a little bit of work could earn him a lot of money? What is it that I could do? What am I not seeing that I should be seeing? What could I create that I could then see, that I could then hop in on? That type of thing. Lots of ideas came to him, but none were right. Like robbing a bank is just too messy and too dangerous.

Running drugs got him in trouble already once before, so not that. But what else was there? Stealing cars? Cars are just kind of too big to hide, and it turns regular people into victims. So that wasn't right. He just couldn't think of anything that would be the perfect mix of being able to stay safe and be able to make money from it.

Years go by, and Frank still hasn't thought of the perfect thing to try. But then, one evening, suddenly everything changed. Frank was out driving around town, and he pulled up to a red light and stopped. He looked up at the light and just stared at it for a moment. And then it just, it for a moment. And then it just, it just, boom. And there was this moment where everything, all the fog cleared up, everything.

It was just so obvious that there was this one thing that he needed to do. What Frank saw in that red light was the ultimate shortcut. The thing that everyone works towards. Everyone wakes up in the morning so they could have a little more money at the end of the day. And so I said, well, why don't I just, you know, skip a whole bunch of those steps and go directly to money? Instead of finding a way to make money, just make money. Yeah, it really is the end goal. It really is. Frank thought going to work to earn money was like a maze that you had to solve slowly. And he just wanted to go around the maze and head directly to the exit by making counterfeit money himself.

Just print the cash himself. But he knew this would be really complex. He'd have to do a bunch of research, problem solving. And bonus, the consequences were very real. Counterfeiting is 100% illegal in Canada. According to Canada's federal code, counts of making, possessing, and selling counterfeit money carry penalties of up to 14 years in prison. If he got busted doing this, he could spend decades in prison. But on the upside, this could make him extremely rich. I've been told by drug exporters that, ooh, this is scary stuff what you're going into.

I just couldn't believe my ears. I mean, they are heavy people doing heavy stuff. And they were frightened by it. They thought it was extremely edgy and risky and it needs to be taken real seriously. I wasn't expecting that. It's strange how hardened criminals and drug dealers were scared of handling counterfeit money. Frank just saw it as another illicit item. Not only that, but money is something everyone wants. So every day, he loved the idea more and more. They checked all of the boxes at one moment.

It was a strange thing. But Frank didn't have a clue where to begin. I didn't know anything about money, more than the next guy does. He just had question after question. What do I need to copy? What do I need to make to make a perfect one? anything about money more than the next guy does. He just had question after question. What do I need to copy? What do I need to make to make a perfect one? So the security features and the different elements and the properties and the thicknesses, the composition and chemical properties and physical properties.

And so I started from scratch. The first thing Frank had to figure out was what country's currency should he try to counterfeit? I had traveled a ton. And you get to realize that there's not a single place on the planet where they don't take the U.S. banknotes. It works everywhere. I mean, the darkest alleys to the largest shopping malls anywhere, any country. There's not one place we're not going to accept it.

Okay, so U.S. currency it is. Even though he's in Canada, he thinks he can still profit off this. Next step, which denomination should he copy? The $1 bill, the $5 bill, the $10, $20, $50, or $100? This was another no-brainer for Frank, though. The U.S. $20 bill was right there in the sweet spot of being a very common bill and worth enough to go through the hassle of making. There are organizations all over the world going to come after you to stop you. This is all they do.

This is the purpose of why they were created. You need to be invisible. You need to were created. You need to be invisible. You need to bring attention. You need to not stand out. So if you want to do $100, well, sure, you can do that because it's five times the amount compared to 20. Sure, it looks like it makes sense. It doesn't make sense at all because everyone's going to look more, they're going to scrutinize more $100 bill than they will a $20.

It's added attention that you don't want. You want less, as less as possible. And a $20 is the one denomination that everyone uses. This doesn't raise anyone's eyebrows. This is exactly the one you want. Okay, these were relatively quick and easy questions to answer compared to what came next, because Frank had to figure out how to actually

copy and print a $20 bill. That was going to take some serious research. He would start his research on the internet, but immediately his paranoia kicked in. If he Googled how to create a counterfeit $20 bill, who would see that? His computer would have the history of it. But would Google track him for typing a search like that? He didn't know. So he just didn't want to take any chances and went down to a coffee shop to start his research there. His first search was... US banknote 20 security features, something like that.

Results popped up on the screen. And one of the first results was the US Secret Services website. It's literally one of the first sites, if not the first site, that I visited just because it pops up on top. Yeah, the Secret Service is responsible for protecting the president. But their first job, the one that they're actually founded for, is to safeguard US currency and stop counterfeiters. Their website's history page is topped with an old-timey picture of an agent busting up a counterfeit coin operation.

Further down, you find out that the Secret Service got started in 1865. It was just after the Civil War ended, and there was a lot of counterfeit currency in the country. The federal government stood up the Secret Service to help crack down on all the fake money. They didn't become presidential bodyguards until 1901, after President McKinley was assassinated. So yeah, if you want to learn about U.S. banknotes, the Secret Service's website is a great place to start. They've got PDFs and links to other websites that explain the major features of all U.S. currency. Let's take a look at the U.S. $20 bill, since that's what Frank wanted to copy. That's the one with Andrew Jackson's face on it. I'm going to

pull one out myself and walk you through what's on here. Okay, so on the front of the bill, there's a serial number printed in the upper left corner and the lower right. Also in the lower right, there's a special 20 printed with color shifting ink. It goes from copper to green, depending on how you look at it. Over on the left, just left of the U.S. Federal Reserve seal,

there's a security thread embedded in the paper. You have to hold it up to the light just to see it right. And then that tiny thread, you can barely make out the words USA 20. And then there are little flags micro-printed in the strip.

If you keep holding the bill up to the light and look over to the right side, there's a watermark of Andrew Jackson's face. These are all things that servers, cashiers, and bank tellers might look for when taking cash. That's why all this stuff is posted on the internet, so people can actually learn how to spot fake money. But for someone like Frank Barasa, this was a valuable learning tool. So you know more leaving this site than you did going in, which is progress. But still, how do you make all this?

If you're an aspiring counterfeiter like Frank and want to know more, the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing website is just a click away. And their URL is very fitting, moneyfactory.gov. The Treasury Department is responsible for designing and printing the U.S.'s paper money, but not coins. That's the U.S. Mint. On the Treasury's website, you can read about the entire printing process, from engraved printing plates to finished banknotes. Frank found this website, too, and was kind of amazed that they listed every step of how they print money. First, engravers scratch a bill's design into different hunks of metal. The designs are then put together into one etching.

This master gets copied over and over into a bigger metal plate, so that instead of a single engraving, you have a bunch laid out in a grid on a plate. For example, when they print a $20 bill, they arrange it in an 8x4 grid, meaning there are 32 etchings, or bills, per sheet. Then these printing plates are loaded into a big industrial printing press, where ink and paper is added. The site even says exactly where they buy the paper from, a company in Massachusetts called Crane & Co. Blank sheets of paper are sent through the printing press.

Plates get inked and then pressed onto the paper. At the other end, the paper dries and the sheets go through the process again for each color. And then the sheets go through the whole process again, printing on the backside. After that, there's a few more finishing steps. Serial numbers are added, and the money is inspected for correctness. Finally, sheets are cut into individual bills, packaged and shipped out. The U.S. Treasury site says they can print about 8,000 sheets an hour, which if they printed 20s, that's over $5 million printed an hour. Okay, that was a lot for Frank to take in. This is not going to be a simple process, but Frank thought it still was doable because at the end of the day, it's just paper, ink, and printers. The single most difficult feature to reproduce on the banknote is the feel.

And everyone knows the feel because everyone is used to handling them every day. So if you take a regular piece of paper, if you take a bag, well, even in pitch dark, anyone's going to be able to tell this is not right, this is right. And everyone's kind of an expert at it because everyone is so used to handling them every day. Getting the feel right starts with a specific blend of paper. According to the U.S. Treasury's website, that's a 75-25% cotton-linen mix. And the way the ink is laid on also adds a unique feel.

It's raised up off the paper just a little bit to give it some texture. You can test this on a $20 bill by running your finger over Andrew Jackson's collar. You can feel it's a little rough right there. Frank found that there are security fibers and chemicals also added to the paper mix. Stuff you have to know about if you want to beat something like to find the actual recipe. So it's just grinding research work that you need to be really good at. I'm extremely good at researching. It's one of the stuff that I'm really good at. I can find stuff, I can figure out stuff. And you have to apply yourself a ton to it to be able to dig up the recipe. Frank was still in his research phase, trying to understand every detail of what went into making a $20 bill. But he was more than willing to put in all this time and research because he knew the rewards were great. And that any tiny mistake on a bill could get him busted.

He needed this to be exact and precise. He treated this research like rocket science. It's tricky business for sure. Frank determined that the equipment used in this process was not consumer-grade stuff. Like some kind of home office inkjet printer would not make it look right and it would not make it feel right. So he knew he had to get some expensive equipment to get this job done right. Once invest into something that can land you in jail for 50 years,

you know, producing something is going to crack or smear. Frank is not the kind of guy who practices with the wrong equipment and slowly improves over time. He'd rather get all the right equipment from day one and get as close to perfect as possible on his first print. This means he needed to understand the process in so much depth that he could replicate the exact process that the U.S. Treasury follows step by step in order to make his money look exactly the same. I had worked, I don't know, thousands of hours on it, thousands of hours. This is what you need to get and not anything different. Frank planned to print a lot of money.

He was ready to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars from his own savings and go into debt to make this work. He penciled out a plan. By buying this amount of ink and that amount of paper would allow him to print $ million $20 bills. That's $250 million worth of fake money. But once he printed all that money, then what? He can't just stick it in the bank and retire. The bank would be too suspicious of somebody walking in with 12 million $20 bills. So he would need a plan to launder this money once he got it. He already had connections

with some drug traffickers and criminals. His plan was to sell each $20 bill to them for $6 each. If he could sell all 12 million of his bills, this would result in him making $75 million from this. And he looked at this number, $75 million. That was the goal. And to Frank, that was worth going through all this to make it work. Stay with us, because after the break, Frank goes all in. This episode is sponsored by SpyCloud. With major breaches and cyber attacks making the news daily, taking action on your company's exposure is more important than ever. I recently visited spycloud.com to check my darknet exposure

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or infostealer infections. Get your free Darknet exposure report at spycloud.com slash darknetdiaries. The website is spycloud.com slash darknetdiaries. Frank pinned that number firmly in his conscience. Seventy-five million dollars. He knew that in order to get to that payday, it would take a lot of work. So he began his lengthy shopping spree of supplies.

The big things he needed to get were the ink, the printing plates, the printing presses, and the paper. We'll start with the printing presses because that's the foundation. Everything has to go through that. What Frank needed was an offset printing press. It's one of the types of printers that the U.S. Treasury uses to print their money. They're good for printing lots of pages really fast. It's the kind of thing that you'd print a magazine or newspaper with. And there's some videos on YouTube which explains how they work. A sheet-fed offset press consists of four main sections. There's a feeder, printing system, delivery system, and control system.

These things are huge. The printing system consists of two main parts, a place to put ink and a place for these metal plates. Basically, a metal plate has an etching of what should be printed, and a layer of ink is spread across that, and then it's pressed down onto the paper. So paper comes through, gets printed, then it has to dry, and then it gives to another color and does it again, and then it has to get flipped over, and new plates have to be added for the backside of the bills, and then the backs get printed. After that, the paper has to dry again,

and then it can be cut into individual bills. I think what you really need to know here is that buying an offset printing press is totally legal and they're fairly common. Any large print shop that prints magazines or newspapers will have one. And you can buy a used printing press for a few hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars

depending on what year it was made and what colors it prints and accessories. But Frank was out of his element here. He did not know how to shop for a printing press. So he needed help. You got to find someone who knows everything about it, like a used car. Is this one a good used car or is it a junk? It's the same thing.

So you got to find someone who knows about it. You're going to go check him out, inspect them and tell you, yeah, this one's good, this one's good. This one's crap. This dude that you need to do that. Well, I didn't know. I didn't know any such dude any more than you do. So Frank had to find a guy, which he did, but he wanted to be careful. Frank couldn't say he needed a press to make counterfeit money. So he came up with a story telling this guy that he was given a contract to print pamphlets for a shampoo company and he needed help buying a printer and to learn how to use it.

With this guy's help, Frank bought a used Heidelberg four-color offset printing press. This thing was huge, like the size of a truck. With it, Frank could pretty much print anything. The shampoo pamphlets, posters, magazines, or millions of fake $20 bills. Frank rented a large building from a farmer near Trois-Rivières, the Canadian town where he lived. It was a little bit outside of town. The building looked like a warehouse. There were no windows, no signs, nice and discreet. It even had a little bit of green paint on it.

The perfect place to print some money. They cut a deal on a no questions asked basis. It would become Frank's hideout and headquarters for the rest of the operation. He had the printing press delivered into the building and closed up the big roll-up doors. Then Frank paid this printing guy to show him how to run everything. You need to become an expert at printing one thing. There's a bunch of different things you can print that I, you know, imply different skills and different techniques, which I don't know. But this one, I need to know

everything about. Frank got busy learning and practicing. You got to practice. You got to know how does it look when this is too far off, when this dial is too high or too low. So you got to practice, practice, practice, which'm getting it now. I'm good. Oh, this. Yeah. Now I'm getting it now. And then you come to a point, you know, like anything else, if you just, you just keep at it while you, you, you get good. Then you say, all right, now, now, now I've got this. And now you're good to go. There was still lots of supplies Frank needed for his counterfeit scheme, like ink. He'd need the CMYK inks and color shifting inks. These were relatively easy to get though.

He looked around online and placed an order. And there's nothing fishy about ordering some ink, even if it's the exact same kind that's on money. Next, he needed eight separate metal printing plates, one for each color, and one set for the front and one set for the back. Each plate contains a grid of what the $20 bills will look like, just like how the U.S. Treasury does it. This was tricky, though, because these metal plates actually have the lines etched into them. The ink is put on them and then pressed onto the paper. Frank doesn't have the machine to etch these metal plates himself, so he had to order these somewhere. But printing plates are actually

pretty common, so it was actually easy for him to find a company willing to make these without them making any kind of fuss. He just needed to figure out what kind of file they needed and then create the etching and get it all worked up in Photoshop and then send it to them. This is by far the trickiest part of it all. It is insane to get that. It really is. Because the bills themselves are very intricate.

They're flowery and ornate with multiple colors. Getting it exactly right wasn't straightforward and took time and precision. He spent a long time zooming far into photos of $20 bills and analyzing every inch of it. By the time he had his plate drawings done, he knew more about 20s than ever before. I mean, every pixel of it looks like a $20 banknote because it's what it is. It couldn't be more obvious that it's what it is. Okay, at this point, he has the printer, the ink, and the metal plates. The last step is to get the paper.

And if you ask any counterfeiter, they'll say that this is the hardest part. This was going to be the biggest obstacle. Frank searched the internet to try to find someone who can make this exact blend of paper. You got to find someone who's going to want to do it for you because you can't go with staples and say, hey, could you get me that? It's just not going to happen, right? So you got to find someone somewhere who's going to want to do that for you without it looking suspicious. The U.S. Treasury gets its paper from Crane & Co. According to their website, Crane has been around for over 200 years, and they've been under a contract to make the U.S. banknotes

ever since 1879. So why not just buy the paper from Crane? So if you call Crane Paper and you say, hey, dude, could you sell me, you know, a couple of pallets or a couple of rolls or, well, who's going to want to call them specifically to have that specific type of paper? They're going to call the cops right away. So Frank started looking at other paper mills. But with this step, he needed to be very careful. He figured paper mills would have an eye out for counterfeiters. That this paper thing was a particularly risky part of the entire scheme.

He didn't want to burn himself before printing a single dollar. Law-abiding people don't like criminals. himself before printing a single dollar. This is what they do because they see something that needs to be stopped. It's just how it is. You have to be mindful of that. You need one screw up and it's going to be the same as if you screwed the whole thing up. Any single point you screw up, it's the same result. It's the end of you. To keep a low profile, Frank didn't even try to ask any paper companies in

the U.S. or Canada. That's too close to the U.S. He wanted to find a paper company far off in a distant land. So you end up looking further away. So you end up in Europe or Asia or something, which is exactly what I did and why I did it, because it's the obvious thing to do. Again, he came up with a fake story as to why he needed this paper. Just to convince any suspicious paper company why he's asking about this exact kind of paper that the U.S. money is printed on. I had set up a fake company. We were this investment firm. I was one of the people in charge of some department over there. And I was given the task to, they wanted to produce a new bond for one of the clients that this firm had that I created. And so I was the one in charge of creating this new bond, you know,

along with the client, so that everything is perfect. His cover story was that his company was printing bond certificates, which is not so common anymore, but some companies still do print these. Think of a bond as sort of an official IOU, or a loan from a company to a person. These bonds look really special, sort of like a stock certificate. They have floral borders and big numbers printed on them and that kind of stuff. And it's completely legal for someone to create their own corporate bonds. So this was a good story as to why he needed a very specific paper that looked and felt prestigious.

So what Frank needed specifically was paper that is a 75-25 cotton linen blend with a 21-pound thickness with a watermark and a security strip going through it. He thought if he asked for all this at once, it might raise suspicion. So he researched tirelessly online, but nobody was selling paper like that, so he knew he needed to find someone to make it for him custom. He called up places and started asking some vague questions. I'm looking to, you know, get a custom type paper for, you know, a client of mine who's looking for this. And so is that stuff that you do or not, or how does that work? Some said, we don't do any custom orders. Others said, yeah, sure,

we can do custom. All right. So what's the quantity? How does that work? What's the minimum quantity that you can do? Then they might say something like, our minimum for a custom order is 20 truckloads. And so I said, well, that's not going to work.

Frank couldn't afford that much paper, but also his warehouse couldn't hold 20 truckloads. And getting that much delivered would also be harder to keep secret. He needed a smaller run, which made him one of those annoying customers that large paper companies don't like dealing with. He looked around online for smaller companies, even looking at maps to find mills and small buildings, hoping that they'd be willing to do a limited run. Finally, he found a paper company in Switzerland that was a good match. This company was willing to do a custom batch just for him.

And they were willing to sell him just a few pallets of paper. So he started asking for one thing at a time. First, he would say something like he wanted the feel to be just right and that he likes the feel of a cotton linen blended paper and asked if they can make it like that. And they said, yeah, sure. What kind of blend are you thinking? And he's probably acting like,

well, 50-50 is probably too floppy. So I'm thinking like 75-25 blend, that's probably good for a bond certificate, right? What do you think? And they said, yeah, well, 75-25 blend is doable. Then you have to have special security fibers that are in the banknote with specific ratios. So you got to find those fibers. You got to source them somewhere. You got to send them to the paper mill. You got chemicals that you need to send to them to add to the mix because the banknote got chemical properties that no other papers have.

And there's a reason. That reason, of course, is to prevent counterfeiting. It's all stuff that you need to tell them, oh, if I send you this, could you possibly add that to the mix? Then there was the watermark. On an official $20 bill, there's a picture of Andrew Jackson's face sort of etched into the paper itself. It's not printed on.

It's pressed into the paper when the paper is still wet. It's not something that Frank can add later. Just to have the watermark, you have to have a whole drum that rolls on the paper while it's in the pulp state. So Frank needs to get someone to make him a drum that the paper company can use to add the watermark. He figured it was better for him to get the drum made and then send that to the paper company.

So he shopped around online for people who make watermark drums. And he specifically looked for people who would not know what Andrew Jackson looked like. Andrew Jackson to you, I mean, is this whole everything character. He's a lot of things to you. Well, the dude from Kazakhstan, on the bank note, well, he's a dude to them too. He's got a date of birth. He's super important. Well, you know nothing about this dude.

You don't know. You don't care. You have no clue what he looks like what he does you don't so if someone from Kazakhstan calls you and say well you want to do this this watermark of this dude you're not going to know about it you're not going to care it's not illegal in your country you don't know the dude you're not going to think twice about it you're just going to yeah sure I can do that send me you know whatever artwork you want of your dude and yeah I'm going to make this watermark for you. So now that he had the watermark drum made he simply sent it to the paper company in switzerland and asked them to use this

drum to add a watermark and they were fine with this request since their machinery supported that and his plan was working they didn't ask any questions about who it was or what was on the watermark and if they did he was prepared to say it was the portrait of their CEO or something. At this point, the paper company has the order of the specific blend with 21 pound thickness and the watermark. He tells them, that's it, that's perfect. But he needs to check with his boss one more time before approving it to be made. But he was really lying. He really needed one more feature added, but his tactic is just to slowly add these little features one by one so that it doesn't raise any concerns at the paper company. The last thing he needed to get right was the security strip. The little strip inside the paper that can only be seen when you

hold it up to the light. It says USA 20 on it and has an American flag. And this was a very important feature that Frank really wanted to add. When you get to the securities strip, that's something else. It's almost like a thread. It's very thin and needs to run across the paper. Asking for it to say USA 20 was really making Frank nervous. This might be too obvious of what he's requesting, that it looks an awful lot like U.S. money. The deeper you go into the different components of the paper, well, the more specific it becomes and it looks like banknote paper. His trick here was to first ask them to make a security strip that says something else, which would seem less suspicious to the paper company. The conversation that I had with them about this trip

until the very last minute was that it was going to be USA 30s and $40 bonds. It wasn't going to be 20. There was no mention of 20s until the very last second. Because 20 tells immediately what it could be. Maybe they'd pick up on it, maybe they wouldn't. But if you wait a little bit, then you're building

on this rapport with this person. Then you have kind of a history with them. Frank then called them and made the final adjustment to the paper. The boss changed his mind and only wants it to say 20 on the security strip. And that worked. Maybe they trusted Frank. Maybe they believed his story. Or maybe they just didn't

care. Either way, they met all of his requests and made the paper. And they shipped it across the Atlantic to a port in Montreal, about an hour and a half from Trois-Rivières, where Frank's operation was. This would be the last major step in Frank's plan, but getting the paper from the port to his headquarters still needed to be done. First, he had to wait a few weeks for it to arrive, but he ordered it under a fake name and to an address far away from him. So he needs a plan for picking up this paper, and to do that, he needs to be extremely careful in case the paper company tipped off authorities. He had to plan to pick up the paper, assuming it was under surveillance.

It's a critical step of the operation where you can go from anonymous to being known by everyone who might be doing surveillance on it. Yeah, up to this point, the paper company didn't know Frank's real name. And if he just comes and picks it up himself, now his real identity is connected to it. If authorities were following the paper, they could arrest or question him or whoever's picking it up and possibly nab Frank. So he needed to be careful picking it up.

There might be 50 people having eyes on it. There might be zero. Both scenarios are going to look exactly the same because there's no chances of them stopping you. They're going to want to roll with it and see where you're going. This is what they want to know. So many scenarios went through Frank's head about how the authorities might try to catch him if they were watching the paper. And he worked really hard to get to this point and did not want to screw things up now. So you got to try somehow to find out

if there's surveillance on it or not. Frank sat and thought for a few days and came up with an elaborate plan to get the paper to his warehouse. He was going to need multiple vehicles and drivers. He rounded up what he needed, explained the plan to the other guys, and it was time to need multiple vehicles and drivers. He rounded up what he needed, explained the plan to the other guys, and it was time to start the mission. All was set. He began phase one, surveillance. Once Frank heard the paper arrived, he went down to the port and

spent a few days just watching the port and where the paper was. He wanted to sit and see what cars came in and out of the port, and if someone looked like they were also watching the paper was. He wanted to sit and see what cars came in and out of the port, and if someone looked like they were also watching the paper. Now, keep in mind, he ordered multiple pallets of paper, so it's a big load, and it was sitting at this port which handles shipments like this all the time. But after a few days of watching, everything seemed calm there. Phase one was complete. On to phase two. Get the paper from the port onto the truck. Frank got a truck and a driver to go down and get the shipment. So my guy went and picked it up and then he left. At this point, they're on the road and three vehicles are involved. There's the truck with the paper in it. Frank is driving his car behind that. And there's a third person

driving another car. They were all communicating with each other through radios. And so I had hired a different guy. His job was to follow my first guy who was in a truck with the paper. You have to follow him in a car right behind him. So it was the truck, and directly behind that truck was this other driver that he hired. So I had planned out a route going from the port leading to the highway. And I said I could make a route where at the entrance to the highway at one point, it narrows down to one lane. The plan was that when they got on this narrow bridge, Frank would have the truck go over first, and then the guy right behind the truck would block the bridge as soon as the truck

went over, like fake a breakdown or something, and block all the lanes so no cars could get by. So whoever was following behind, well, they couldn't follow anymore because he was stuck in traffic, you know, cars piling up behind. So this guy was paid to stall his car 20 minutes right in that one lane thing there. And then Frank would watch the other motorists to see how their reaction was to the situation. If you see people jumping out of their cars and running on foot to try to switch vehicles. You know, you can say, well, this is no good.

So they got on the bridge, the truck went over, and then Frank's other driver hit the brakes in the middle, causing all lanes of traffic on the bridge to come to a stop. The guy got out and popped the hood and threw his hands up in the air. Frank watched as the traffic started to pile up. Motorists were angry, but nobody was doing anything like jumping on the roof of their car with binoculars on the truck or people on some kind of radio telling other cars that they're stuck at the bridge.

Then Frank craned his neck skyward and looked for a helicopter or airplane, but he didn't see anything. Everything seemed fine. He radioed to the guys stuck on the bridge to pack it up and move on. It's all clear. So the only thing that it up, move on. It's all clear. So the only thing that was left possibly was electronics. It was like a bug somewhere in the box or in one of the pallets or something like that.

Frank had a plan for that too. They weren't going to take the paper directly to the print shop. Instead, he asked the driver to drive the truck around for a while and then park it in a lot about a half hour from Trois-Rivières. Then they'd leave the truck parked there for a few days. We put surveillance on the car for three days there. See if anyone would come close or circle around, you know, cars that would come back a couple of times, anything that would stand out once again. Not that there was necessarily going to be anything, but you got to try. After three days, nothing. So on to the final phase.

They wanted to switch the paper from that truck to another truck. By this point, Frank hired a few guys that he trusted to help do the printing. He had them thoroughly go through every box looking for any kind of electronic tracking device. They checked the paper, the boxes, the pallets. It all looked good. They loaded these boxes onto new pallets So by now, I was sure that we were free. I was sure enough to the point where I drove the truck to my print shop. This is how safe I felt about it being not bugged.

This was the moment Frank had worked towards for months and months. He says he spent about $320,000 of his own money getting all this equipment and supplies. But now, everything was in place to start printing counterfeit money. He was giddy with excitement at this point. Jesus fuck, I mean, this is really it. It's like the official beginning of the race is what it is. You have all you need. You don't need anything else. No one can stop you at this point because you haven't sold anything.

He taught the other guys how to use the printer and they practiced with regular paper. But now they were ready to do their first test run with the right paper and the right ink. It was showtime. Now, just a matter of retuning everything and then you hit everything perfectly where it needs to be. And then you're fully dialed in exactly the right color, perfectly the right paper, everything. Now you're fully dialed in, exactly the right color, perfectly, the right paper, everything. Now you're good to go. The test print looked good.

The money felt right. The plan was working. Frank says the results were impressive and that they'd shuffle real bills in with the fake ones to see if they could spot the difference. Try to tell me, you know, which is which. You can't tell. There's just no way to tell.

The plan was going good, but there was a lot of work still needed to be done. Printing $12 million, $20 bills takes a long time. It sure wasn't party mode. At this point, it's just factory work. It's exactly what it is. You just go in and you put your suit on and then you print, print, print, print, print, print, print all day, all day, all day. And then you leave. And then the

next day, it's literally grinding factory work. Frank had his helpers doing a lot of work. This operation was just too much for one person. Opening boxes of paper, feeding it into the printers, loading up the ink, getting the metal plates in place, printing one side, letting it dry, then printing on the other side. I mean, printing presses, it's just pew out paper. You just feed trolleys at the end of it, and then it will stack up, you know,

trolleys a couple feet thick. Then they take big stacks of paper off the trolley carts, cut the bills, and put some finishing touches on them. It seemed that Frank had made some very convincing $20 bills. He was counterfeiting millions of U.S. dollars, and he wasn't slowing down. His plan was to print the money as fast as he could, then stash it somewhere, and then hide all the evidence that this ever happened. Well, you don't want that sitting there. You want to get rid of that. Yesterday, Frank and his crew were able to print $12.5 million, $20 bills.

That's $250 million worth of fake money. That's incredible. They looked real. They smelled real. They felt real. Now, Frank paid his crew real nice for this. Nobody was allowed to take any of this fake money home or anything. And Frank sure wasn't going to spend this money himself. That's just too risky. You don't want to show up at a gas station,

buy gas for $20, and then when the fake bills get discovered, there's all this surveillance footage of him pulling the money out. You don't go through all that to get caught over $20. He needed to sell this money, and fast. So you got tons of money piled up. It's good because it's a possible profit, but if you were to get caught, well, it's evidence against you. So you're in a hurry to get the paper, in a hurry to get printed. You're happy when you do, and when you do, you're in a hurry to get rid of it. Because if you get caught with it, it's not good. It's end of your life scenario. This is how serious it is. To make selling fast and efficient, Frank actually lined up clients before he started printing. He tapped into his criminal network of drug traffickers who exported overseas.

Frank didn't want his cash getting out into the States. Instead, he wanted it pushed to Europe, Asia, Africa, somewhere far away. He made contact with four potential clients that could help make this happen. Now that the printing was done, he followed up with those clients to offer free samples of his product. And yes, Frank gave out nice little free sample packs of money to show potential buyers how it looked. The whole line from the initial exporter down to, you know, the last people in his crew operation, whatever it is. Well, I want them to have it. I want them to try it. I want them to test it. I want them to know for a fact that it is perfect. And I want them to tell me, oh yeah, we are fine. It is perfect. We are in.

The deal was that Frank was offering to sell this fake money for 30 cents on the dollar. So for $3,000, you could buy $10,000 worth of Frank's money. That's pretty good, considering Frank's money looked so good. The free samples paid off, because Frank's clients started agreeing to buy fake cash from him. They were so convinced the bills looked real that they wanted more, which was good for Frank, because by this time, Frank had spent every last cent he had to get to this point.

I'm down to no nickel left. I sunk everything into this. And so then you start making the sales and then you're seeing profit coming back from it, which is really, really nice. People started agreeing to buy fake money from him, but everyone was a little skittish at first. Neither buyer or seller really made these kind of deals before, but it sort of went down like a typical drug buy. First, Frank didn't want to be there for the deal, so he had another person do the sale for him. They would show the buyer a box of fake 20s, and the buyer would have a duffel bag of real money.

And it's a little tense when so much money is being exchanged. Frank would offer to sell smaller quantities at first, like thousands of dollars at a time, just to show them he was trustworthy. You cannot be more upfront than this. And this matters because it shows that no part of you wants to screw them over. You're in for doing solid, proper business. And it's important you do that. After his clients were able to take these samples and make some smaller buys, they were coming back for bigger buys. The plan was actually working.

Frank quickly made back his $300,000 that he invested into this scheme. It's a really good place to be. You're back to where you were, and then you got this whole pile in front of you that you can profit from. Now that felt really good. Things were going good. More buyers were in. And he knew from here on out, all was profit. He ran his calculations again.

And if he could sell his entire inventory at this rate, yeah, he could make 75 million real dollars from it all. It was just a matter of time to get through it all. And he needed to get this fake money as far away from him as possible, as fast as possible. Of course, Frank was real careful with every buy, too. He set up a network of runners to shuttle cash to his clients. The main stash was at a hidden location, and there were smaller stashes spread around different places. When a client needed to make a buy, a runner would go to a stash, grab the money, and deliver it. And if one of the smaller stashes ran low, a runner would

simply resupply from the main stash. Frank set it up this way to distance himself from the operation and make it so that not any one person knew what the whole operation was. Now you got stuff on the streets. Any one of those bills is added risk to you because all those people, any one of them can be under investigation for any number of things. You want to be beyond invisible at that point. There was a bottleneck though.

Frank didn't want to advertise this sale to everyone because he wanted to limit the exposure. He only told a few drug traffickers about this money, and out of them, only four were repeat buyers. And the amount of money bought by these four clients, well, it just wasn't moving fast enough. It was going a little slower than how I thought it was going to go. So Frank decided to add another client. So I said, we're going to add a fifth one, and we'll see if that works, and maybe a sixth one. We'll see.

But we need to at least add one. So Frank checks in with one of his guys to help expand the network. Turns out that Frank's guy knew someone that might be able to help, a guy named Eric. I had him checked out and all that. He someone that might be able to help. A guy named Eric. I had him checked out and all that. He was solid. I okayed it, and it was fine. This guy Eric ran a gang that trafficked stolen construction equipment. Even better, though, Eric knew a guy who wanted to buy counterfeit cash.

So he got Frank connected. But Eric helped out by being the middleman. He'd get the money from Frank and then pass it off to this new client. And things were rolling. Frank sold him a chunk of $100,000 for $30,000 in real cash. I sold him a first order. And the next day, he said, well, would like to buy some more. I said, fine. And then the next day, and the next day, did that for, you know, four or five days or something. Normally, Frank would have a runner deliver the cash. But this deal came together quickly,

and Frank wanted to oversee it himself. So he broke protocol and handled the cash himself, delivering it to Eric. Now, at the time, Frank was living with his girlfriend, but he had a very strict policy on what she was allowed to know about this, which was nothing at all. The more she knew, the more trouble she could be in if things didn't go well. So he didn't want to get her involved at all. Girlfriends knowing anything that you do makes no sense unless there's an absolute need for anyone to know what it is that you're doing that makes no sense for

them to know. The fake bills started making their way through the system, showing up in strip clubs in Illinois and Michigan at first, then grocery stores and restaurants along the east coast of the U.S. It was very hard for people to detect this fake money, so it would often pass a few times without anyone knowing it was even fake. In the early morning hours, May 23, 2012, Frank was asleep at his girlfriend's house. And at around 5 a.m., he heard a loud noise, which jerked him awake. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So, uh, you're just waking up by tons of people banging in every door and window all around the

house. You're startled, you wake up, I mean, your heart's racing, you know, something's totally different. And after, you know, two seconds of being awake, then you come to realize, oh fuck, that's today? Damn. And, oh, fuck, that's today. Damn. And there's nothing you can do.

It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and they had completely surrounded the house. Frank knew he had no way out. So you just go up to the door, you open up, they come in and they flood in, they search, they seize, they take everything, everything. They cuff you and they leave with you. According to an RCMP press release that came out the next day, it was a joint force of RCMP, Quebec Provincial Police and the U.S. Secret Service that raided six different locations and arrested four people, including Frank. The sting was part of something called Project Cranium, which was the investigation into Frank's operation. When they searched Frank's house, they found almost $1 million in counterfeit 20s in his safe. They also found printing equipment used to add holographic details

to fake bills. In a CBC article that also came out on the following day, the RCMP spokesperson described the operation as highly sophisticated and that the counterfeit bills were basically undetectable to the naked eye. After the raid, authorities brought Frank to an interrogation room. Now you get into the interrogation

and now they try to squeeze you and you try to tell them nothing because this is what you got to do. Frank was so careful and spent so much time on this operation that he wasn't going to let them just squeeze answers out of him. He kept quiet and had a stoic look on his face with any questions they asked. But then the cops brought up his girlfriend. They used a girlfriend because they said, well, this was into the house, the house under her name. So she's in on it.

We can charge her. So then you're really in a bad spot because you can't let that happen. So now they're really squeezing you good. They really are. It's a tough spot to get out of. Piling on the bad news, authorities in the room told Frank he was facing counts of fabrication, possession,

and distribution of counterfeit money. And since it was U.S. money, they were saying they would extradite him to the United States, where he could face 20 years for each count, a total of 60 years in federal prison. There's no party who doubts that they're going to extradite you because the Secret Service,

with their bulletproof vests written Secret Service on it, were in my living room. So, you know, they are here, they are taking it seriously, and they mean to pursue it. Frank later learned that Eric, the guy who he was selling hundreds of thousands of fake bills to, it was his crew that had been infiltrated by an undercover Canadian cop. And the cop was actually the guy Eric was passing the money to. He didn't know that Eric was compromised, and this is how Frank got

caught. Frank had a hard choice to make. If he stayed quiet, it was likely that his girlfriend would be charged with all kinds of criminal activity. He did not want his girlfriend tangled up in this. He took huge measures to make sure she had nothing to do with this so she could not get in any trouble for this. So his other option was to fess up to the operation in hopes that they'd let her go. But what are you going to do? It's your thing. It's you. So you got to take it. Despite the consequences, Frank talked. He admitted that, yes, he's the one who printed the money. And he told him his girlfriend had no clue and was innocent in this whole deal. He knew this was all being recorded, too. You're literally hanging yourself.

And there's no way out of it. You leave the interrogation room thinking and feeling that it's the end of your life. It's you getting locked up, you know, stateside. It's the floor vaporizing from under you, literally. There's no future ahead of you. This was the last thing Frank wanted to do, but he felt like he had no choice. Once questioning was over, authorities booked Frank into a jail and denied him bail. He was stuck. For now.

By design, you have to know going in, you have to tackle any criminal operation going in, that it is possibly going to stop, if not likely going to stop, because there are people whose job, whose sole job is to stop you. They're going to come take everything from you so that you cannot maneuver. This is what they do. So it's not a pleasant time for sure, but you have to know that going in. It's part of the deal.

Anything you're going to need to have access to, you need to prepare for it. So if you need phones, if you need this, if you need money, you need to prep ahead of time. You got to plan for your exit strategy because you can crash at any time. Frank had previously set up a lawyer in case a situation like this were to happen, and his lawyer got busy trying to get Frank out of jail. The Canadian courts were considering extraditing Frank to the U.S. to be tried there. But Frank says his lawyer was able to block extradition, and that's because the lawyer pointed out that the RCMP did not have adequate surveillance footage of Frank. Here's what happened.

On one of the days that Frank delivered cash for the undercover RCMP officer, a helicopter was hovering overhead, and it was recording video of this transaction. But at the meeting location, Frank instinctively parked his car underneath something that had a roof over his head, where he could unload the cash without anyone seeing from far away. He says that's why he picked this spot in the first place, because it was a good place to hide.

So they lost sight of me for a bit. And because of that, they couldn't justify having eyes on the boxes that counterfeit 100% of the time. This meant the cops didn't have actual video evidence of Frank handling the money. And Frank says this is why the extradition got thrown out. Frank's lawyer then negotiated bail. After six weeks, Frank got out on $10,000 bail. But Frank still had to answer to the Canadian government, or the Crown, where he was looking at hard time for the same charges, fabrication, possession, and distribution.

Since this was Frank's first counterfeiting offense, he was hoping his lawyer could negotiate some kind of deal. So if you do something one time and then you get caught, then you drop out of it. And this is the least amount of consequence that you can have for an offense. So my counterfeiting days were over for the rest of my life. And so whatever money I had left, well, I wasn't going to start selling it ever again. At this point, Frank had only sold a few million dollars in fake money out of the $250 million that he printed. He knew that there was a stash of $200 million still out there, and he knew that the cops didn't find it. In fact, the cops didn't know about it at all.

They thought they seized all the fake money. Only Frank and one of his closest guys knew about it. Frank's plan was to get his sentence reduced as much as possible, then use the $200 million in counterfeit cash as a bargaining chip to cut an even better deal. Hopefully this will work, but this is the one thing that I had left. It's the only thing I had. So court appearance after court appearance, and the lawyer is trying to negotiate with the Crown to get the punishment reduced. I want it as close to zero as possible. So the only way to let it go as close to zero as possible is to string every bit of the talent that my lawyer has. The lawyer gets the sentence down from decades to a handful of years. And this was all a plea

bargain. If Frank admitted that he was guilty at this point, he would just get a few years of prison without even a trial. It's quite amazing that the lawyer was able to reduce it so much. Sheer grinding work. All him. Nothing else but him.

He's a legend. But even though his sentence was reduced to a handful of years, Frank still didn't take it. I could see every court appearance that we went to was getting nastier and meaner because everybody was pissed because, you know, all I kept saying in my letter was, no, I don't want this deal. I want lower. I want lower. According to Frank, the Browns prosecuting attorney had enough at this point. Frank wasn't going to take the plea deal. So they

said, well, fuck it then. We're going to fucking trial. Which was risky for Frank. He felt nervous because of this. Because if he was acquitted, well, great. He got out of the whole thing. But if he was found guilty, he'd probably end up with a much bigger prison time than what this plea deal was.

So this was the moment for him to play his last-ditch card, the bargaining chip that he was waiting this whole time for. Then you can take out my ace, which is exactly what I did. Before the trial began, Frank finally told his lawyer that he's got $200 million in counterfeit 20s, and he's wondering if they can use that to bargain with at all. And his lawyer was willing to give it a try. But Frank wanted to move the money to a new hiding spot before telling the courts about it.

This way, he'd have it all ready in case they wanted to make the deal. So I made my call, set up my plan in motion, called my guy, and my guy went over there. And I had set up, I had time that I was going to put that in the truck and put a truck at a particular place in a parking lot.

I hid the truck right next to the main boule that in the truck and put a truck at a particular place in a parking lot. I hid the truck right next to the main boulevard in the city. It was sitting there for like a couple of months. In the back of this box truck was $200 million in counterfeit cash and the printing press. Now he was ready to bargain. On the first day of court, they started with this, saying that Frank knows where $200 million in counterfeit money is and he's willing to turn it over if he can get his sentence reduced. The court was shocked with this news.

They thought they had confiscated everything and didn't know that there was more money out there. But this worked. The Crown was willing to negotiate one more time. Frank worked out a deal that he'd turn over the $200 million and his Heidelberg printing press. In exchange, the Crown would drop the counterfeiting charges. But there was a tiny catch. The Crown didn't want this stuff immediately. They set up an exchange for a month out. Frank thought that they were doing this to try to find the money

before the date, which would get him in even more trouble. They wanted to get that money, but they wanted to get it themselves so that they could keep the charges on me. So by giving this drop date a later time, well, you know, in their heads, they said, well, somewhere, somehow, he's going to have to do something to get this money to move places. He's going to have to do something. So we're going to try to catch him doing it. And the deal was, if I got caught before that drop date with anything that was getting hammered with it. And my lawyer said, do you understand what that means? They're going to be on you, like your own fucking shadow. I said, all right, where do I sign?

Frank didn't care because he already stashed the money and the printing press in the back of that box truck and thought for sure nobody would look there. So all he had to do was lay low for a month. Frank says the cops were all over him during that month. I mean, surveillance was on me 24-7 at that point. Helicopters and all that. I mean, every day, it opened up the curtain.

They were right in front of me. They weren't hiding. They just figured, we just need to tell this dude 24-7. He's got to do something at some point. Then I'm going to call. Then he's done. As long as they didn't find that truck, Frank was safe. It's January 31st, 2014 rolls around. It's the morning of the drop date.

My guy left the key ring to the truck behind a specific tree in a little wooded area. And so I went to the court with them following me. And I stopped, I grabbed the key ring, and then I had it on to court. And then once I got there, I gave the key ring to my lawyer. I said, here it is, all of it, as promised. They were pissed, extremely pissed. They were mad because he had hidden this information from them. They were mad because he wasted a lot of the court's time.

They were mad because they didn't find this money themselves. Frank outsmarted them. They wanted him to drive to the pickup location. So he got in his car and a convoy of black SUV police cars followed him through town. It was weird being followed by that many police through town. There was the canine unit, plus there was a bomb squad. People in hazmat suits and bomb chutes and stuff. I mean, it was packed, packed, packed.

I said, damn, for me? I was really, really surprised by that. It was ridiculous. He slowly drove through town and watched people on the street looking back at him. He wondered what they were thinking. Maybe the president is in town, they thought. Maybe this is a big drug bust. Helicopters were flying over him, following him. Nobody watching from the street thought that all this was to pick up some counterfeit money. That's for sure. He arrived in the parking lot. He got out of the car and stood in front of the box truck where the money was,

and he told the police, this is it. The police did not trust the situation one bit. A bomb squad came in first and swept the truck and then asked Frank to unlock and open the truck in case it was booby-trapped. Would you be willing to open up the doors? Yeah, sure, open the door. Would you walk inside, you know, just in case it might be, you know, a trap? You know, yeah, sure, sure, sure. And then would you start the truck just in case, you know, some things were, yeah, sure, sure, sure. And then would you start the truck just in case, you know, some things were, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So I started the truck.

So that's fine. At this point, the police felt like it was safe enough to go into the back of the truck and check it out. I saw pictures of what it looked like back there. In the back of the truck was the printing press. And when you look behind that, there were pallets of boxes. Inside the boxes were stacks and stacks and stacks of fake 20s. So much money was in this truck.

Frank's in the pictures too. He's wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with a black puffy vest over it. He's got a goatee and his hair is pushed up in a faux hawk. He looks tired, maybe a bit relieved. There are two cops in the photo going through the boxes. And sure enough, this truck was loaded up with millions of fake $20 bills. Once the cops confirmed that this was what Frank said it was, then the cops had one more request. They wanted him to drive the truck back to RCMP headquarters.

I drove the fucking truck. I was alone in the truck, surrounded, surrounded by black suburbans full of cops, helicopters, tons of police force blocking every road. Frank says the cops were worried about a bomb still, and that maybe he had an explosive set to a timer, or that if the truck went over a certain speed, it would blow up. And this is by far the strangest thing that even to me, even to this day, this is really, really strange.

As he drove down the street, the irony of the scene wasn't lost on Frank. If he had done this just one day before, they would have tried to bust him and throw him in jail. So the same action, you know, carries a totally different weight to it, right? This was the very same money, the very same counterfeit action that was being charged with, now was totally okay. So the exact same criteria are horrible one day and then okay the next day. Because of some papers, it made it okay. It said, Jesus, fuck, this is a strange world. And in this strange and twisted story, the Crown dropped all counterfeiting charges against Frank after he turned this money and equipment in.

He says they did charge him a $1,500 fine for a drug-related charge. Numerous articles say that when the cops raided Frank back in 2012, they found drugs in his car. Otherwise, the only time served that he had for this counterfeiting scheme was the six weeks he spent in jail waiting to get out on bail. The other guy that he sold money to, Eric, the one who ultimately got him caught, he was sentenced to 31 months in prison over his stolen construction equipment and his ties to Frank.

These days, Frank says he's gone totally legit. In fact, he turned the skills gleaned from counterfeiting into a real business. Right after my court case, I got involved into consulting for counterfeiting protection. And I've been doing that ever since. If you go to Frank's website, frankbarasa.com, you can read more about his trademarked Mastery Ages program. It's his method for evaluating and giving feedback to organizations to stop fraud and counterfeiting. He feels he's uniquely suited to help identify counterfeit operations.

It's a nice challenge. It's new stuff all the time, and I need to hit it dead on because if I'm going to do it, well, I want it to be perfect. And it impacts the people I do it for a lot. Because I know what makes it impossible to counterfeit something. And I make sure to do that. So I affect the bottom lines a ton to the people I do it for. So I know I have a lot of positive impact on those people. And that I really like. I call it my redemption through protection effort is how I termed it. It sums up the essence of what I like about it. Frank says he's even reached out to the U.S. about their currency. I even offered them to redo your currency, where not a single soul would be able to counterfeit it,

because I know what would stop me dead in my tracks, And I could do that. So I even offer them that. Frank says they turned him down on the offer, though. Now, there's something about Frank's story here that's missing. And if you've been paying attention, you might have noticed that the numbers don't add up. You told me you printed $250 million. Yes. And that's what the authorities say, that they counted up how much paper you ordered and stuff they were able to calculate you printed about 250 million yes you gave up 200 million to them there's a mismatch there was the other 50 million million, Nick.

Wait, there's a mismatch? Yeah, it doesn't add up. Damn, I'm going to need to look for that somewhere. Let me get back to you on that. I'm going to look into that. I'm going to look into that. I'm going to look into that. A big thank you to Frank Barasa for coming on the show and telling us this incredible story. You can learn more about him at frankbarasa.com or check out the show notes for links. If you like this show, if it brings value to you, consider donating to it through Patreon.

By directly supporting the show, it helps keep ads at a minimum and it helps create the show. And it tells me that you want more of it. So please visit Patreon dot com slash Darknet Diaries and consider supporting the show. Thank you. The show is made by me, the never fake Jack Recider. This episode was produced by the cash clenching, Charles Bolte. Sound design and original music by the key tickler, Garrett Tiedemann. Mixing done by Proximity Sound.

Editing help by the sunny, Dean Yen. And our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. There was this one time where I went to New York and I had a fake $50 bill. It was like twice the size of a normal bill. And someone on the street came up to me and said, Hey, do you want to buy a fake Rolex watch? I said, hell yeah. Is $50 good? And they said, yeah. And I pulled out my giant fake $50 bill and said, okay, here. And they were like, what the heck? And I'm like, hey, fake watch for fake money, right? This is Darknet Diaries.