How Fake Movie Money Gets Made! 

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The Secret Service really is no joke when it comes to counterfeiting. I grew up in and around a family owned print shop. I'd go to work with my mom during the summers and when I was old enough I worked. Our two primary printing presses were AB Dick 360's, which at the time (don't know if they still are) were one of the most popular printing presses in the world for counterfeiting -- because of the relative ease of use, size of plates they took, and printing accuracy. ANYWAY, one of our biggest clients was a regional bank and they wanted to do a promotion printed on paper stock that was basically the same/similar linen paper used for currency (but without the imbedded blue and red fibers and I don't know if it was the exact ratio of linen and cotton... but it was meant to have the same feel). Secret Service agents accompanied the delivery of the paper and literally stood guard during the entire printing process. They gave guidelines for how much of the paper had to be "ruined" by being covered by ink and what colors of ink were allowed (nothing in the artwork could resemble money in any way) and they confiscated every single scrap, test print, etc. They VERY closely monitored the plate making process to ensure that ONLY the approved artwork was on any of the plates that got anywhere near the press the paper was being used on. I'm not sure what the rules are today regarding using the linen paper for non-money purposes, or even if it was or wasn't frowned upon at the time and only allowed because a bank was the client. But it was a very interesting few days in that particular Sir Speedy print shop...

Apparently in GoodFellas, Robert Deniro didn't like the feel of the fake money, so the Prop Master basically took out thousands of dollars of his own money from the bank to use in the film, and he made darn sure he got every bill back when they weredone using it.

Fake notes for film production is not just an issue for the US. There was a big story in the UK when the BBC got into trouble over a Dr Who episode, the money had David Tennent rather than the Queen on it.

I would buy fake pesos as a reference to the classic movies. I always wondered why the prop money in old movies looked odd. This history is so awesome

The Secret Service didn't get anti-counterfeiting 'by default' as Adam claims. It is the very reason they were founded. Protecting the first family came later.

I could listen to these two gentlemen for hours! Both individually and together.

lol, I worked at a graphics company and we had a visit from the secret service because our retail sticker was on a can of speedball printing ink that they found when they arrested a counterfeiter. And it’s true, they are all serious and absolutely not ready for humor. They made us close the store down and we all were questioned thoroughly. We were closed almost the whole day and not allowed to leave until they were done with their investigation. Luckily they realized we weren’t involved. It’s an experience I will never forget!

A one-time co-worker said he got robbed by a bank ATM that dispensed fake money to him on payday. When he stopped at the liquor store, his $20 bill was declared fake, as were several others. The private security van company contracted to service those machines was involved in a few shenanigans around that era. Counterfeit money is NOT a victimless crime. Regular people end up losing their money down the line.

Sadly enough, one of the senior citizens around here actually got tricked into selling his car to someone for about $10,000 worth of theater prop money. He discovered it about 30 minutes after he signed the title over, due to being vision impaired. The way he discovered it was when a restaurant rejected his money because it said "theater prop money" where the seal of the United States Treasury is supposed to be. Thankfully, there are solutions for situations like this. And if it ever happens to you, contact local law enforcement and your local department of licensing to report it. The paperwork is a pain, but you can file it as a stolen vehicle.

Always glad to see Michael Corrie on the channel. He Adam have so much knowledge AND joy.

I was surprised that the counterfeiting scene from ""To Live and Die in LA" didn't come up in discussion. They had a real counterfeiter actually make real counterfeit 20 dollar bills using an offset printing process, and they showed everything, right up to using poker chips and rags in a dryer to age the fake bills and add the red and blue threads. IIRC, there was much paranoia during the filming of the scene because they were skirting legality pretty closely and didn't want to get raided by the Secret Service.

I did an art project a few years back on real money, with the presidents wearing covid masks and I wanted to scan it an make a poster, but photoshop has a money detection filter and wouldn't let me open the image to enlarge and make a print. was so frustrating.

The secret service showed up at my junior high school once back in the 90s, because some students in a drafting class had printed a bunch of poor quality fake $20 bills and had actually tried to use them to do things like order pizza or buy snacks at the gas station. I doubt the students faced any harsh punishment since they were minors and weren't making high value bills, but the secret service takes the counterfeiting thing pretty seriously.

A few people I know who work at banks say that they receive several pieces of prop money every year, mainly through gas stations, vendors, and people who have to deal with a constant flow of people that they don't have time to check smaller bills carefully.

As a senior in high school I was in my 4th year of Auto Cad/ Mechanical Desktop. In between working on actual class work I measured and redrew an exact replica of our school’s Lunch ticket. Down to the miniature emblem included in the School name. It was perfect. It took some effort to find paper the same shade as the school lunch tickets, but lets put it this way. Myself and 2 of my closest friends didnt buy any lunch tickets our senior year. Hahaha. Sorry Mr. Bell. Haha

Interesting to see, though they never mention it, that all the fake notes have the same serial number.

A print company I worked at years ago had a visit by the CID. They were checking all local printers because someone had been printing money but had sent the guillotine off cuts to the paper recycling mill, which had the trim area on it. FYI it wasn't us.....

So the company basically has a money making monopoly on making monopoly money.

fun little anecdote, for TV filmed in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver etc.) they just use Canadian money, because it can't be mistaken for US currency (our money is very colourful) and we don't have the same regulations about not using the real stuff as a prop. There is an episode of Stargate Atlantis where Canadian fives change hands very predominantly and it gives me a little bit of a giggle knowing why.

There was a stand that had counterfeit money and real money and the guy told me to guess which ones were fake and which ones were real. The best way i could think of telling them apart was to smell them. Money has a very unique smell and it would be difficult to recreate that smell on counterfeit money because you would have to have a lot of people hold it touch it throw it in therir wallets ect. I could tell which ones were fake and which ones were real. He was very impressed to say the least and told me he thought of everything else to make it look perfectly real but never thought about the smell. I walked away $50 richer that day😂. That would've made a very good episode on Mythbusters

My favorite scene with money prop is in BTTF 2. Doc Brown opens his briefcase and its filled with US cash from different decades.

These videos have been some of the best, truly a gift for film lovers, fans of film history and prop history. Thank you tested for these! I hope they never end!

Michael Corrie was an absolute delight to listen to, would love to see him come back for future prop episodes!

This is honestly fascinating, one of the best videos on this channel I've ever seen. I was engrossed the whole time.

This series has been amazing! Thank you for sharing with us

I was really hoping to see some future money from Back to the Future. That briefcase always intrigued me and I'd love to hear about what details they put on the future cash.

Prop money is great to have in the games cabinet. Poker night is so much more fun with realistic money and a bag of good costume jewelry. One of these days I'm gonna get some old-fashioned stocks, bonds and deeds printed up to go in there as well.

It was nice seeing Adam and Jamie back together lol

Please do more videos like this. Was really interesting.

These visits with Michael are absolutely brilliant!

Earl Hayes Press is an awesome place. I love their discutions about the props and I hope we'll dive deeper into the archives.

It’s such a delicate thing to have movie money. I have seen some movies use money that looked more like Monopoly money than real money. I have seen prop money with the “for movie use only” or something similar, and I feel that should suffice, because you really couldn’t pass that too easily, unless cashiers are not paying attention. Very informative video for sure!

If I correctly from high school, 19 years ago, the Secret Service was originally created to combat counterfeit money, and then later was given the duty of protecting the President

LOVED this, thanks for making and sharing!

I want a series of these two just geeking out over props. Adam for the general knowledge and geeking out and Michael for the inside stories and tidbits.

That was a fascinating watch. It would have been nice to hear more about the paper itself and how close it is to real currency.

A while back I worked at a place where we handled lots of GBP coins and Euro coins, anywhere from 0.5 to 2 coins. The coins would be passed from hand to hand in small numbers, its crazy how comfortable you get with the weight of specific coins. This was a case with all the staff, we were able to tell when the weight of the coin was off and would refuse to accept it. The detail on the fakes was insane, super hard to tell apart other than the weight.

Very interesting and informative video here Adam and crew! Thanks for sharing to the world!

Loved seeing the plates! More of that, please. The props themselves are very cool, but I see props in every movie I watch. The way the props are made is super interesting to me.

I'm sorry, but if your prop house gets raided because your props are too good..how is that not the best advertisement for your skills ever?? Also...can we PLEASE get an entire channel dedicated to film prop history? I would watch the heck out of that.

I was once involved in a music video production and we used a lot of fake money in some shots. They were extreeeeemely serious about every single note not flying away. We had several people running down the mountain and diving into the harbor...

I loved this video. I hope you can make more like this. Thank you!

Time to enjoy another video by Adam, and get on another watchlist!

I have a good friend who has been a film prop master since the 70s. He never liked the look of prop bills, so if there is a need for a stack, he will have the prop bills form the stack with a real bill on top. Just because a suitcase full of bills is "full of bills", it doesn't mean that they ALL need to be real. Just what's showing on top. He's lost a few $20s over the years, and once a $100, but it was covered in the cost of his services.

someone should use that guy a narrator, he's energy and voice is so nice!

That was amazing! I never thought much about prop money and this was eye-opening!

The most fun at my old job was using my art program to replicate antique labels for myself. Find best image online, convert to line art for clarity, pick the right color shade for backgrounds, print out, tea stain, crinkle up & glue onto tins. Amazing results.

I had to explain this to a company I worked for back in the 90's. They decided to put a display in the office which was basically bags of money spilling into a drain (It was supposed to be about 'waste' and how doing 'x' was like throwing money away)... except to make it they'd basically scanned real bank notes and printed them (this was before scanners were chipped to refuse to do that). I explained that they're basically just counterfeited a ton of money, and they told me it was okay because the bills they'd printed were black and white and no-one could mistake them as real... and I had to explain that just because it was a _bad_ counterfeit didn't mean it wasn't counterfeit. They didn't listen Eventually legal saw it and told them they needed to destroy it and the people responsible got a proper bollocking.

I wonder if they could just print the bill in mirror image, then in the actual movie, reverse the film footage visually so it looks like normal money in the person's hand.

I absolutely love these videos at Earl Hays! Right On! 🙌

great vid! interesting history, glad we got an extension video around it.

I know this might be a huge ask, but I LOVE maps, can you do an episode on maps by Earl Hays maps or prop maps in general? Thanks in advance!

Secret Service causality is a bit backwards. They were created SPECIFICALLY to counter counterfeiting. They later on picked up body guarding duties. They were only divorced from treasury after the formation of DHS.

I stumble across this in my main RU-vid feed. Very, very fascinating. I had always wondered about money used in movies. And now I know how they do it.

In the late 90's I made a bunch of stage money for a production of Guys and Dolls. Knowing it only had to look good from 15+ feet away, I pixelated the image so they were made of 1/8" colored squares. Holding them in your hand, you had no idea what denomination they were supposed to be, but step back 10-15 feet and you could sware they were tens and fives. Only way I imagine doing that these days would be to take a photo from a distance so there is no detail, or purposely make it blurry. (oh, and since I worked at a print shop, I made a lot of calls and got my plan approved before making them)

2:25 funny enough in my retail days, I had someone try to pass a bill that looked pretty much right, but was about twice as large as it should be. As you might expect, they did not successfully check out that day.

I've wondered if Canadian productions set in USA have it a bit easier, or is it the same as far as restrictions, etc. And thanks Adam and Tested and Earl Hays! This has been a fantastic series!

This was a really great video!

You guys should keep doing episodes together! Very interesting!

There’s no way Adam didn’t add a Godfather II, pre-Castro, Cuban bank note replica to his prop collection. 😂

I bet Adam grab some GF2 bills 😂

Fascinating. Nicely done.

Such a cool video Adam. I love this channel so mich

Film budgets are often so astronomical that you would think that using real money would be no problem in many cases...

For me those "blue" bills looked very real. I could see a touch of blue but it looked like a shadow or lighting issue, not like a blue bill. So those are probably the safest to use, since Adam said they looked the most fake.

I just want to give appreciation to the fact that one of the great inspirations from my childhood is on RU-vid and continuing to teach and share his interests to others. Brian May and Kirk Hammet were my inspiration to play the electric guitar. Mr. Adam Savage is the inspiration to understand how the instrument and the other pieces needed to make it work, work. Savage and May are the inspiration that has put me on the road to building my own guitar.

this was delightful!!!

Can they make polymer bills like our Australian ones? 🤔

I once worked a stage show that needed $20 bills and I didn't have time to make anything, so I asked a friend. Two weeks later, he handed me a stack of $20s that appeared to be direct scans of real bills. I was horrified. As soon as the show was over, I collected them all and quietly destroyed them.

Way of the Gun is one of my favorite movies and it never gets talked about. Great quote!

I did work experience as a kid with the Australian Federal Police, and I remember being shown a wall that was pretty much wallpapered in examples of money they had confiscated. One was a hand-drawn $100 bill... I was told a kid drew and tried to pass it off to his school canteen as a joke. The joke was not seen, despite it being totally obvious it was a hand-drawn note.

This guy looks like if Adam and Jaime had a kid 😂😂

Real money is fake too. Money is only worth anything because people say it is.

This was so much fun!

Fascinating! I love the movie references and stories. I hope your cameraman is feeling better 😕.

I didn't know that! Something new to talk about comes Monday morning!

Thanks great video,

Thanks for that!

Cool process

This whole issue is obvious now you point it out, but I had never thought about it before. Thank you so much for doing this story. I was intrigued by the aside you mentioned that you were allowed pretty realistic currency provided it was double size. And the fact that a lot of the currency that Earl Hayes makes is a slightly different shade of ink, that's corrected by the lighting when the movie is shot. Excellent piece!! Thank you.

I work in the security industry, and I use prop cash to stock up 'sacrificial wallets' to catch pickpockets & muggers - Depending on what our target is (we get a lot of theft from tourists around St. Patricks day), I get a wedge of Dollars, Euro or Sterling (- English, Northern Irish and Scottish) notes. I crumple up the notes- lower denominations more than the higher (as they change hands more often). I also 'mess up' the cash I rub in dirt, grease from food, etc (again lower denominations get dirtied quicker). So I will then stock the wallet with a couple of $1 dollar bills (about 5) 3-4 of these I'll have roughed up to varying degrees (I might throw a real $1 note at the front). A $5 dollar bill or two (both roughed up), a couple of tens & twenty's (again slightly roughed up to varying degrees) then either a fifty or two (one slightly roughed up) - and a $100, more often than not the $100 will be almost pristine. I then stock up the rest with 'pocket litter' -fake receipts, fake business cards, dummy ATM cards, post-it notes, stock family photo's.

Thx for the tutorial

This is fascinating

I would think the simplest (and lowest cost) thing to do for a high budget movie is to just put a real $100 bill on top of each stack that is going to be in a close up.

Fascinating.

Mad respect for Michael at PropsToHistory. Almost wish you'd brought out the book of the dead today too.

Adam needs a few stacks of those to just leave sitting on a shelf, in his bathroom, on the table saw, or his mill in his shop. Just to see the reaction he gets when someone comes by and, while they are wondering around, happen to come across a few thousand dollars just sitting there. Great conversation starter, and the looks people would give him would also be great. Maybe use a couple of stacks to level one of his 3d printers!

*Really* cool of Earl Hays Press to sell of some of that old memorabilia! I'm sure they've got warehouses of the stuff from over the decades just taking up space.

Really fascinating industry!

Having been in the printing industry for a while, it was fun to learn more about this as I knew a good bit, but there was still plenty to learn from this video. Now go and properly reshoot that cable comparison video with the right items to compare against.

Way of the Gun is an AWESOME film! Love it!

There is a great William Friedken film from the 80s called to Live and Die in LA. It contains the most amazing scene depicting money being made by a master counterfieter.

Now I'm remembering the bit which was added to the start of the ST:TNG episode "Darmok" when it was originally transmitted. This sequence is never included in the episode nowadays, since it involved people who were just fans of the show being "actors" for the sequence as a contest winner reward. The reason I was reminded of the sequence is that it involves a new (post-war) government on an alien planet and they are supposed to trade some mineral ore the Federation needs in exchange for some equipment their government needed. One of the pieces of equipment is a duplicator machine which is a step below a replicator and a few steps above a 3D printer. The new government has decided that they can't spare the ore and want to pay the Federation for the equipment using their worthless (to the Federation) currency chits. Ryker circumvents this by taking one of the chits and feeding it into the duplicator. He examines the duplicate and the original and muses that it's not quite right, but that'll be solved as soon as the machine is given locally sourced materials to work with, and adds that ensuring the serial numbers are different on each copy is a minor setting change. Then Ryker points out that they could try trading the equipment to the government's enemies in exchange for the minerals they want. The new government quickly backs down and decides to deliver the minerals as agreed.

The rules for currency don't just affect money but also paper gift certificates and coupons. They all by law have to have an expiration date placed on them or the government will consider the company that issues them to be printing their own currency. If you ever have a gift certificate with an old expiration date on it, don't throw it away, the store where it came from will often honor it. For sales coupons they are generally issued for that particular promotion so the expiration date is the day the promotion ends.

Great episode 😃 I hardly ever use cash these days. Everything is contactless especially since Covid.

I'm a big fan of film noir so I know I have seen the bills before. But a few of those movies revolve around counterfeiting specifically, I can't help but be curious if Earl Hays provided the engraving plates for on screen use as well. "Southside 1-1000" would be an example.

I remember during my time working for a repair and refurbishment company for a major printer manufacturer, we were told that it was important to report any copies of currency (no matter how accurate or silly) we might have seen. I remember some of my coworkers thinking that the secret service being involved sounded ridiculous, and me having a hard time convincing them that it was real and very serious.

Every once and a while, I'll see a news story about someone trying to pass off movie money. It seems to be from the same source, it's $100 bill that looks similar, but Ben Franklin has this worried look on his face and it says "FOR MOTION PICTURE USE ONLY" instead of "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" and missing the green seal (which if you've ever been to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, you'll know is the last step in the process of making money that makes it official). And apparently it's easy enough for people to buy stacks of this stuff.

One money related prop I've always wanted to replicate is Doc Brown's briefcase from BTTF: Part II where he has an assortment of US cash from different decades.