The Piranha of Portugal: the Greatest Counterfeiter of All Time (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Piranha of Portugal: the Greatest Counterfeiter of All Time (2014)

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109 pointsjpelecanos20 comments

Thanks for posting. A very similar operation is happening today in North Korea: Millions of counterfeit USD/CNY/EUR are printed and laundered through NK banks every year[0]. Turns out somebody has already done it before.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

"A lowly, underpaid teller who worked part-time at a jeweler to help make ends meet had become suspicious of the Banco Angola e Metropole. The Escudo notes he received were never in numerical order (Reis’s plan to shuffle the banknotes to avoid detection actually caused detection),[...]"

Rats. The Germans got caught with the WWII tank serial numbers, this guy sidesteps that (years before), gets caught.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Being from Portugal I wonder how this was completely unknown to me

Not to me. RTP made a whole TV series about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/

(Not that I recommend watching it)

JFYI, there was also a (IMHO quite nice) TV mini-serie in Italy long before the 2000's, in 1974:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accadde_a_Lisbona

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGYt5_UJWF0

etc.

That's curious, thanks.

I'm asking the same thing, never heard of him until know

More than anything, I find interesting the impact this probably did have on the failure of democracy in Portugal back then.

Probably no real impact. I'm not an expert and my knowledge on this comes entirely from a free guided tour of Lisbon I went on today, but the democracy was already a complete disaster. The second paragraph on this wikipedia article[0] says it all:

> The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine presidents and 44 ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy, government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and religious persecution".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic

Wikipedia’s article on the forgery says it was a major cause of the coup that estsblished the decades long dictatorship.

In the repercussions section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis

Obviously not the only cause of course. But it sounds like it was more than zero impact.

The linked article actually gives a decent amount of credit to the forgery for the downfall of democracy.

"The revelation of the counterfeiting plot created a huge loss of confidence in the corrupt, democratic government. Military officers who were aggrieved over their pay failing to keep up with inflation, overthrew the democratic government on May 28, 1926. ... A scheme to counterfeit currency and make a forger rich had led, indirectly, to the downfall of a democracy which was followed by a forty-year dictatorship."

As a local, I can't say I trust our History education very much, but when we studied the First Republic, this story wasn't even mentioned. In fact, in 1917 there had already been a coup by an army official/politician, which lasted for only a year until the guy was killed.

I like that one of the high end techniques was to social-engineer a banknote printing company of repute, to print your banknotes.

Those moments when high end US government officials get given proof sheets of banknotes, one-sided half-printed notes, Steve Woz gets his banknotes bound into a cheque-book like thing.. They're on the fringe of 'what is money' questions too.

No less than 330,000 banknotes introduced in circulation. The man is a legend.

"Historical examples of government-induced debasement include: [...]"

Does the switch of many EU countries switching to EUR count in this context as a valid example as well?

Care to explain in what kind of bizzaro logic universe a country adopting a currency counts as debasement?

I'm asking it as question, not stating it like a premise I agree with.

I can explain what happened in my country:

First, we had the guilder (NLG) since the 17th century [1], then we adopted the EUR. The conversion rate for us was approx 2.20 NLG for 1 EUR.

When we adopted the EUR basically within a few months everything became as expensive in amount as it was before but then in EUR. That's not a normal recession or normal inflation.

This inflation often gets directly attributed to adoption of the EUR. Whether that is factually correct or not, I don't know. If it would be factually correct (ie. let us assume it hypothetically is), would it be a correct example as a debasement?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder

Now I understand the question, thank you.

So, _inflation_ is a term normally used for increase of good's prices over time as measured in the currency of the country where you're buying the goods. So you can't use the term inflation to mean "the conversion rate was 2.20 NLG for 1 EUR and within a few months everything because as expensive in amount of EUR as it was before in NLG." This isn't a mere technicality. You can't measure increase in price across the moment when the EUR was introduced, because the EUR didn't exist before that and the NLG didn't exist after that.

In my opinion the conversation onwards should be: if something happened, what interesting metrics should we be looking at to detect it and measure it? Let me suggest one: number of hours of median salary needed to buy the CPI basket of goods. Measure that before and after the introduction of the EUR. If that number increased, then you can say that consumers lost purchasing power. Loss of purchasing power does not necessarily follow as a consequence of inflation (although it can) but is usually the bad consequence of inflation that people worry the most about.

I believe he means all the outgoing currency getting destroyed.

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