I Printed Fake Money at Home—and It Actually Worked

Date: April 7, 2025
Author: Mason Trelawney

I don’t know what possessed me, but sometime around the early 2000s—long before YouTube tutorials or Reddit threads—I got it into my head that I could figure out how vending machines accepted money. I wasn’t trying to be a criminal mastermind or anything. I was just…curious. Too curious, maybe.

I’d learned a bit about how coin mechanisms worked—how they measured weight and diameter to reject slugs and foreign coins. It was cool, but what really intrigued me were the machines that accepted bills. I’d heard from someone (probably another bored teenager) that if you understood how they scanned or measured bills, they weren’t that hard to fool. That alone was enough to light a fire in my brain.

I was about 15 or 16, living in a small town in Canada, and honestly had too much time on my hands. So I started studying actual bills. Back then, Canadian money was still paper, and I noticed something: each denomination was a different size. Not by a ton, but definitely enough to be measurable. It was one of those details most people wouldn’t think twice about. But I did.

So I grabbed some decent-quality paper—printer stock, I think—and a scanner, and started tinkering. I wasn’t trying to make counterfeit bills to spend in stores or anything (I wasn’t that bold), but I did want to see if I could get a vending machine to accept something close enough. After many failed attempts and weird experiments, I managed to create a couple of fake $5s that, against all odds, actually worked in a few of the older soda machines around town.

I didn’t make a habit of it. Honestly, I think I tried it three or four times tops, and the thrill wore off fast. I didn’t want to get caught, and I definitely didn’t want to ruin my life over a can of Pepsi. But for a brief moment, I felt like I’d hacked the system. Not to steal—but to prove that I could. That my curiosity wasn’t dumb. That maybe I could outsmart something built specifically to not be outsmarted.

It’s been over 20 years now, and vending machines are a whole different beast. Cameras, digital readers, Bluetooth—good luck faking anything now. But every once in a while, when I pass by one of those newer models, I smile to myself and think, “Yeah, I had my moment.”

And it worked.