The Piranha of Portugal: the Greatest Counterfeiter of All Time (2014)

[Laforet]

Thanks for posting. A very similar operation is happening today in North Korea: Millions of counterfeit USD/CNY/EUR are printed and laundered through NK banks every year[0]. Turns out somebody has already done it before.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

[B1FF_PSUVM]

"A lowly, underpaid teller who worked part-time at a jeweler to help make ends meet had become suspicious of the Banco Angola e Metropole. The Escudo notes he received were never in numerical order (Reis’s plan to shuffle the banknotes to avoid detection actually caused detection),[...]"

Rats. The Germans got caught with the WWII tank serial numbers, this guy sidesteps that (years before), gets caught.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[pouta]

Being from Portugal I wonder how this was completely unknown to me

[icebraining]

Not to me. RTP made a whole TV series about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/

(Not that I recommend watching it)

[pmcpinto]

I'm asking the same thing, never heard of him until know

[orixilus]

+1

[erebrus]

More than anything, I find interesting the impact this probably did have on the failure of democracy in Portugal back then.

[montyf]

Probably no real impact. I'm not an expert and my knowledge on this comes entirely from a free guided tour of Lisbon I went on today, but the democracy was already a complete disaster. The second paragraph on this wikipedia article[0] says it all:

> The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine presidents and 44 ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy, government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and religious persecution".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic

[icebraining]

As a local, I can't say I trust our History education very much, but when we studied the First Republic, this story wasn't even mentioned. In fact, in 1917 there had already been a coup by an army official/politician, which lasted for only a year until the guy was killed.

[ggm]

I like that one of the high end techniques was to social-engineer a banknote printing company of repute, to print your banknotes.

Those moments when high end US government officials get given proof sheets of banknotes, one-sided half-printed notes, Steve Woz gets his banknotes bound into a cheque-book like thing.. They're on the fringe of 'what is money' questions too.

[peerreviewed]

No less than 330,000 banknotes introduced in circulation. The man is a legend.

[Fnoord]

"Historical examples of government-induced debasement include: [...]"

Does the switch of many EU countries switching to EUR count in this context as a valid example as well?

[fwdpropaganda]

Care to explain in what kind of bizzaro logic universe a country adopting a currency counts as debasement?