Woman Enters Car Dealership With $16K in Home-Made Bills

A woman who tried buying a car with home-made money ended up leaving the dealership in the back of a police car, Fox News reports. The 20-year-old German, who remains unidentified, carried the equivalent of $16,830 into a dealership in the city of Kaiserslautern on Friday. But the 50 and 100-euro notes were printed on regular paper with an ink-jet printer, police say, and weren't hard to expose. Officials soon searched her home in nearby Pirmasens and discovered a printer with freshly made counterfeit bills adding up to nearly $15,000.

Prosecutors haven't yet charged her, but federal police say the alleged crime—"imitating money with the intention of putting it on the market"—is worth at least a year behind bars, Deutsche Welle reports. While some counterfeiters use advanced equipment, basic counterfeiting tools are easily obtainable online in Germany and can be used with "no special knowledge," police say. Germany reported 54,000 counterfeiting cases in 2018 amounting to over $19 million in fake money. (More counterfeiting stories.)