The man who went 10 years without being caught using crude counterfeit $1 bills: why did he target $1 bills instead of high-denomination notes?

An elderly Austrian-Hungarian immigrant in New York, Emerich Juettner, secretly made crude counterfeit $1 bills for nearly 10 years.

Because $1 bills were rarely examined closely, his low-volume forgery went unnoticed from around 1938 until his 1948 arrest.

The Secret Service eventually found his fake notes and printing plates, leading to a light sentence and a short prison term.

Juettner’s unusual case later inspired the film and story “Mister 880,” turning a petty crime into a public curiosity.