The Buck Stops Here | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

so he was about six three six four kind of lanky but played basketball so muscular like huge nose big lips
this is maya and when she was 19 she was infatuated with a guy named adam these names aren't real we're using fake names
for reasons it'll become apparent later just kind of hit all my personal buttons
in a way that honestly very few people have since then it was almost as if he was my physical ideal
and i actually remember seeing him for the first time my freshman year and really feeling like my
breath had been taken away when you're infatuated with someone you can convince yourself of a lot of things like who
they are and what they're capable of and maya was infatuated i had this feeling of really not being able to
believe that i was like allowed to physically touch this person but just because you can touch something
doesn't mean it's real i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal [Music] so our first date was actually pretty
hilarious i'm not sure exactly how it was arranged but i was very very very excited about it for
multiple reasons um one that i was just physically kind of putty when i looked at him even
but also because he lived in brooklyn and so we both went to nyu but he and i lived in the dorms in
the city and he had an apartment in brooklyn and i think i've been to brooklyn once
so that night we actually went to a magazine party because he had worked at a magazine briefly before school so i
was at this very sophisticated party and he people were very much in love with him
there and women were all over him there the way they were everywhere but it was definitely an older crowd i mean we must
have been 19 and everyone was probably in their late 20s and i got completely hammered like so shit-faced
that i think he actually had to carry me back to his apartment which was of course mortifying so we went back to his
apartment he put on some d'angelo i think he smoked weed or we both smoked some weed and i was like this is actual
heaven like this is my understanding of what heaven is but then nothing could really happen because
i basically blacked out [Music] the next day i woke up and they were you know like blunt papers kind of all over
the floor and this and that and he was like yeah you passed out so i basically just smoked weed and like listened to
music and i was really embarrassed and then so we started our trek back to the city i wasn't really sure how to get
home and we got our kind of the standard bacon egg and cheeses and i think i got
a coffee and he got a snapple and he we went to the train station and he swiped me in on his metro card and then
jumped the turnstile immediately a plane closed police officer started chasing him
so i was stuck holding his breakfast while he takes off like a bolt of lightning and is literally being chased
around by a cop i see him hiding behind a trash can i see the cop running up a flight of
stairs and i just got on the train and went back to my dorm with his breakfast and my own and he finally called me
either that night or the next morning and just tried to play it off and she let him it didn't seem like that
big of a deal it was kind of a funny story so while it's not the typical foundation
for a successful relationship they ended up going out again and again they dated for a couple of years
but slowly maya started to notice other little things like he told her he grew up in the bronx when he was actually
from new jersey he was always borrowing things from people asking for favors and he managed
to almost never spend money his whole thing was figuring out how to live with nothing so
at two points when we lived together we lived for free he had this incredible way of talking his way into kind of
people's homes and then saying he would do something for them and he just i've never seen anything like it he would
just get away with not paying rent they graduated from college maya was taking acting classes adam wasn't
working and those little things the lies and the mysterious ways in which adam always got his way began to escalate one
of the biggest things he did was steal a projector from a hotel that he was just
kind of walking through randomly and he found a conference room with a really fancy projector and just walked out with
it and was very excited because it was something like ten thousand dollars and he didn't know if he wanted it or if he
wanted to sell it um but it i got really upset and he basically bullied me into saying you
know this corporation or these people have so much money they're stupid for leaving it out and i need it and i want
it and i took it it was there so he's doing all of these things you kind of know about him what he's doing
did he you ever help him uh well i didn't help him until we started counterfeiting money
um so how did what do you mean until you started counterfeiting money well one day i came home uh to the
apartment we were living in again living in for free and he very proudly showed me a 20 bill
and i said where did this come from and he explained that he had this color printer
and he had spent the entire day scanning and then you know kind of lining up copies
of 20 bills so that he could create something that was two-sided and actually it looked pretty decent and he
went through a period of kind of trying to find the right color and finding the right paper because
you know now bills feel and are very slick they're very hard to kind of wear down but back then you could still have
kind of a nubbly or very rough feeling bill wait a second it seems it seems to me like you you need more
than just like a color printer to counterfeit money or like just some special paper i mean isn't that what
like there are thousands of people that just spend their whole lives trying to make sure that you can't just buy a
color printer and start printing hundreds it was child's play kind of i mean it couldn't
have been a more basic and kind of pathetic operation i mean it was two kids in their twenties
um you know [ __ ] around in brooklyn and it worked [Music] how long did it take him to convince you
to actually use the money do you remember the first time it really left the house
um it did not take long the first time we went out um we we did discuss it and we i think we tried it
once or twice at a deli and it didn't work i mean what do you mean it didn't work so they would just say this is fake
were you mortified like i would just i would i would pretend to be like are you kidding me i got ripped off like no i
had a whole song and dance every time i got caught like are you kidding what am i supposed to do how did this happen i
can't believe this oh my gosh i'm so sorry and it was kind of through these these like pathetic little plays that
we'd put on that we realized that people were much nicer to me if i was the one who did it and got caught they
just kind of treated me like a stupid little girl but would actually get much angrier at him
so what we figured out then was that we really couldn't we wouldn't be successful if we were doing it at a
place where people had the opportunity to pay a lot of attention to the money that we were handing them so any place
like a well-lit bodega or a supermarket wasn't gonna fly so we quickly realized that we needed to do it at bars
places where bartenders were busy places where it was dark and people were distracted
and what we were doing we weren't interested in drinking or partying we were just interested in getting the
change so you know six dollar beer 14 back and you pocket that um and maybe drink part of the drink and
leave so one of the first places we went i got caught and i you know performed my
little performance and i remember very distinctly the bartender saying i'm going to choose to believe your lie
but this isn't real and you need to get out of the bar and i kind of skedaddled and freaked out
i made my boyfriend drop the next bill that's what we called it dropping bills at another bar and it was actually a
female bartender and she flipped out and chased him out of the bar and said she was going to call the cops
and he was laughing but he was terrified and that's where we really realized that
i was the person who was going to be most successful maya didn't realize this at the time but
she and adam were part of a trend lots of young people were getting printers and making their own money
in two thousand forty percent of all counterfeited money about seventy two million dollars came off of inkjet
printers it's a big deal counterfeiting is a federal crime investigated by the secret
service if you get caught you're facing up to 15 years in prison and massive fines i
don't think we ever hit up more than six places in an evening but inevitably during one of those during those nights
someone would stop me somewhere i remember we were on a good streak and then i had
to go to this one bar and these were all bars that i liked and had gone to previously and this bar had a bouncer
out there that particular night and there was a cover charge and i tried to pass off a bill to him
and he said that it wasn't real and i was a little bit drunk at that point so i did my whole song and dance and i kind
of sensed that he knew that i was full of [ __ ] but he again just kind of let me
wander away and did did you ever go home after like you know the the night where
the bartender said i'm gonna choose to believe you would you go home a night and say to him this is nuts like i don't
i why are we doing this this is not worth it i do not remember ever doing that um i
think i didn't have the balls because i think that he thought it was really fun and i thought it was a little bit fun
myself the final time that i was caught was so bad that that's what made us stop
but it took getting that close to being in serious trouble for the rest of my life
for me to kind of snap to it maya says the whole operation had only ever been the two of them they never
told anyone what they were doing and never used the fake money when they were out with others
then one night maya had a childhood friend come to visit he was wealthy and wanted to go someplace a lot nicer than
the dive bars they had been going to so we go to this you know super swanky club
varied 90s club scene kind of place and i have a stack of bills in my purse and a copy of macbeth that i was using
because i was memorizing a monologue from lady macbeth's and he i think also had bills on him but as
usual i was kind of the one in charge how much would you carry when you say you were carrying like a stack of bills
how much how much counterfeit money would you carry on you at one time i think at that point i would i probably
had around 100 or 140 dollars and he probably kept the same amount so he dropped one bill successfully at a
register and drank whatever drink he was given then i successfully dropped a bill
at another register and we kind of just kept the evening going and then at the end of the night
we were kind of toward the back of the club as one of those places that had multiple bars in multiple areas
and i was kind of staking it out it was the one we hadn't gone to yet and we were not doing a very good job of being
subtle and i was very aware of the bar tent this hot female bartender was aware that we were looking at her and she was
kind of staring right back and then i kind of entered into this kind of bizarro dream state where i knew that if
i dropped a bill with her i was going to get caught and i physically couldn't prevent myself from walking over to the
bar and doing it so i walked over i ordered a drink and i slapped down the bill and she
immediately knew it was fake and i kind of tried to launch into my little song and dance and she said she grabbed my
hand and she said i'm calling security and i don't know if she got on the phone or pressed a button but i was
immediately swarmed by security guards and taken into the back of the club they didn't go through my bag um i
refused to give them my id and i just kind of kept saying i don't know where this came from i'm so sorry this is so
stupid i then uh tried the tactic of getting really angry and saying that my friends were waiting for me and then
they got on their walkie-talkies and they said check all the registers and then i thought
i was sunk because there were definitely bills and other registers and at that point i thought okay i'm done
she waited while the bartenders carefully checked each piece of cash and somehow which seems just like incredible
luck no one found anything the bartenders must have already passed the fake 20s on as change to other customers
they let me go and i did not act cool i immediately kind of tore through the entrance and pushed
through pushed past the bouncers and pushed through the line instead of the exit and i went out alone away from my
friends i just felt like i just had to get out of there and what i didn't realize was that by doing that i was
causing a scene and essentially incriminating myself so my friends followed me out and then the same
security guards who had been detaining me intercepted me on the street they went
through a back exit of the club and they said why are you in such a rush to get out of out of there and then this is the
whole scene that unfolded in front of my friends they said okay we're searching you you
know this and that and i said you can't you can't that's not legal and they said
again it's either us or the cops and finally i just gave them my purse and they they looked through my wallet and
didn't find any bills because the bills weren't there and then they flipped through
the macbeth and they didn't find it they just didn't they just flipped past it i think probably because there were only
a few bills and it wasn't it didn't cause enough of a gap for like when they were skimming their finger over it to
find it but it was i didn't understand how that happened it was almost impossible
and where was your boy was your boyfriend watching this whole scene he was watching and all also are all of my
wealthy friends what happens next do you go home with your boyfriend so i went home with my boyfriend uh we
were both really upset we both agreed that we weren't going to do it again and then i met up with my good friend
from home the next day and he said so are you counterfeiting money and i just looked at him and i said nope
and we kind of had a mutual moment where we decided to agree to believe my lie because he
definitely didn't believe me and i definitely wasn't about to tell him the truth
[Music] do you think of yourself as a criminal i don't why i think i must i'm not sure why so this
is i've never really considered this before but i didn't even though i did have criminal intentions you know i
wanted this money i wasn't trying to hurt anyone and don't feel that i particularly hurt anyone
although certainly i guess it's possible that if a bartender was caught you know if if they were caught
with a counterfeit bill in their cash register that they could get fired and that's totally possible
but to me it was so stupid and has kind of become a bit more fun in retro it's become both more fun and much
more embarrassing in retrospect you know it's a great story to tell at a party because i wasn't caught
and how long did you and adam last after this incident not long [Music] maya left new york she went to
california to try to get adam out of her life forever which was hard because as much as she was scared of what he could
make her do she was still just as fascinated with him as she was from the start it's been more than 15 years but as far
as she remembers they only profited about 400 and frankly she doesn't know what they
did with it she does know they didn't spend it on anything nice because adam was so cheap
[Music] the show is produced by eric menno lauren spore and me julianne alexander
does our episode art if you like what we're doing you can subscribe on itunes or visit our website
thisiscriminal.com we're on twitter at criminal show i'm phoebe judge and this is criminal
[Music]

Counterfeiting, also known as printing fake money, wasn't always easy to do until the advent of the Inkjet printer. By the year 2000, there were 72 million of these homemade dollars in circulation. On this episode of the Criminal Podcast, we talk to a woman who “made” her own money.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 3 originally published February 28, 2014 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-three-the-buck-stops-here

Brief Summary

Maya recounts her infatuation with Adam and their reckless counterfeiting escapades in New York City.

Key points

Maya's Infatuation. Maya describes her intense feelings for Adam, feeling breathless upon seeing him.
The Counterfeiting Scheme. Maya and Adam engage in counterfeiting money, leading to a tense encounter with security.
The Aftermath. After the incident, Maya decides to leave New York to escape Adam.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I felt like my breath had been taken away.

Maya recalls her infatuation with Adam.

0:42WatchOct 25, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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