We all know that money does not, in fact, grow on trees. It also doesn’t come shooting out the front of your inkjet printer.
At least it shouldn’t. Not if you don’t want to spend an extended amount of time in a cell.
That wasn’t enough to deter a 20-year-old German woman recently. She wanted to purchase a car. She had a perfectly good all-in-one inkjet printer sitting around at home and a ream of standard-grade inkjet paper just begging to have something printed on it.
As you can see from the image shared by the local police, she decided to whip up a pile of €100 notes. She also printed some €50 bills, too, because sometimes you just don’t want to ask somebody if they can break a large bill.
The 2013 Audi A3 during its world premiere at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show. (Photo Credit: A163 / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Next it was off to the car dealership in the German city of Kaiserslautern, where she set her sights on a sharp-looking 2013 Audi A3. Her salesperson thought everything was pretty normal from the minute she first approached right through the end of the test drive.
That’s when things got weird. The woman was given a final price of €15,000 which she then attempted to pay with a fat stack of her DIY €100 bills.
The salesperson was understandably caught off guard, telling Neue OZ (Google Translate link) that he’d seen plenty of odd stuff in his time at the dealership but never anything quite like this. “No one was that brash,” he said.
“I just asked her incredulously if she wanted to play Monopoly,” he continued. When the customer maintained her poker face he figured it was time to call the police.
They apprehended the suspect then headed over to her apartment where they discovered an additional €13,000 hot off the inkjet.
According to German police, counterfeiting carries a minimum prison term of three months for someone who’s acting alone. If the young woman in this case was part of a gang, that jumps to at least two years.
Actually attempting to use counterfeit bills generally increases a convicted perpetrator’s time behind bars. The code doesn’t mention those penalties being reduced purely on the grounds that even small children running a lemonade stand would’ve recognized the bills as being bogus.
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