An ordinary civilian might fall down that hole never to come out again. Just showing a fake ID to a fed could be met with serious retribution.
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/139493
Legends
One oft-repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows: Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to “phreak” his call around the world. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England. Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. He sometimes repeated this stunt at parties. Draper also claimed that he and a friend once placed a direct call to the White House during the Nixon administration, and after giving the operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus", and asking to speak to the president about a national emergency, they were connected with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper’s friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles, at which point the person on the other end of the line angrily asked them how they'd managed to get connected to him.[8] Draper was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32723420
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: How MetroCard works (2005) [pdf]
Then there was the time the infamous phone phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper got busted for forging BART Cards... Steve Wozniak and his son also got mistakenly busted and thrown in a holding cell for 4 hours because he had a (real) BART card that didn't work, so he got pissed off and ended up paying for Draper's attorney fees, and Draper copped to a misdemeanor of altering MUNI tickets, and went on probation for a year, but did not lose his job at Autodesk.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/just_tacky
>TECHNOLOGY. March 1, 1987. JUST TACKY! By CBR Staff Writer.
>Aw c’mon John, forging the electronic characteristics of BART tickets is just tacky! John Draper, who inter alia wrote the Easy Writer word processing package, has been caught with $2,500 of forged access tickets to the San Francisco Bay-Area Rapid Transit subway system, and fellah, BART, which has never fully recovered from the teething troubles in the early days when trains used to whistle through stations at 60mph with the doors wide open, can’t afford it; Draper’s real claim to fame is that he discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle given away in packets of a glutinous and bilious-coloured sugared corn puff cereal called Cap’n Crunch was pitched just right to mimic the tones AT&T used to set up long-distance calls, so that packs of the sickly Cap’n sold out as kids rushed to claim the whistles that enabled them to call auntie in Montana or Mary in Maine; that was ingenious if wicked, but forging BART tickets – tacky, John, tacky.
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
>DigiBarn Radio: John Draper @ Autodesk (1985)
>Listen to John Draper talking about his Autodesk period, the BART card fiasco and more! (8MB MP3, recorded May 2006)
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06...
>John Draper at the Digibarn's Homebrew@30 event
>Thanks Tom Barbalet for recording this rare interview with John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" or "Crunchman" these days) about his life at Autodesk, and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cards fiasco. Also included here are other life and times of "Crunch".
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
Partial transcript (listen to the whole thing for the full story about the BART card fiasco -- I'm just transcribing the part about Woz getting arrested here):
[...]
John Draper: So Woz game me a Mac I could use, and Woz also go me a ... Cause Woz got hassled by the BART cops too.
Here's what happened, here's what happened at that point.
Woz went to go see the Oakland A's game. And what he wanted to do, he had his son with him. So his son I think at the time was about 9 years old. And he wanted to take his son to the Oakland A's game.
And his son says "Hey, daddy, can I ride BART?" Sure, why not? So he goes to Hayward BART, er, he goes to Hay- not Hayward, yeah, he goes to Hayward BART, yeah, parks the car, and rides BART to the Oakland Coliseum. Ok.
So what happened was, his son's BART card didn't work. He put it in to the turnstile, and it got rejected coming back. And Woz goes over to the BART attendant and says "Well my card doesn't work", he says "look, it comes back, it came back and said rejected or something."
And the guy, the BART attendant says "Wait right here." He gets on the phone, calls the BART cop. BART cop takes Woz and his son down to the Lake Merit Station, ok. At which time they grilled Woz about what he'd, that he'd, and they were claiming, accusing him of tampering with the cards, and they threw Woz and his son in a holding cell for like six hours.
Tom Barbalet: So let me get this straight.
John Draper: Until they could get an expert to come in and take a look at that card, to make sure that the card had not been tampered.
Tom Barbalet: And the card was a regular card that they just bought.
John Draper: Yeah, just a regular card that they just bought.
Tom Barbalet: So they knew your connection with him?
John Draper: No they did not know my connection with him.
Tom Barbalet: So how did, why was he...
John Draper: His card didn't work. They suspected that he had tampered with the card.
Tom Barbalet: But surely that would have happened to, just in a sample size, a hundred, maybe two hundred people in the Bay Area.
John Draper: I don't know the details, all I know is they arrested him and his son, and they held them up in a, put him in a holding cell for four hours, until they can wake up a, get the BART engineer to get out and examine the card, and once they figured out it was their fault, they let him go.
Tom Barbalet: Right.
John Draper: So when Woz found about the BART fiasco that I did, thing, that I got roped into, Woz says, "I got this attorney, I'll pay for, I'll pay for your legal attorney fees. Go see this guy. So I went and say this guy, this attorney. So he was handling my case in the BART thing.
[...]
Dangerous game to play, imagine trying to convince a judge that "I was not intentionally looking for trouble".
It also would seem likely that at least one protector of said currency (the agent in the story) didn't know his domain (currency sheets are legit).
Unless he just wanted to harrass Woz, or maybe because they suspected him of other mischief and wanted to see if he misstepped.
You cannot buy perforated currency booklets.
It's reasonable to be suspicious about the latter, especially as I suspect Woz didn't start the interview with "I bought the currency sheets then had them turned into this" - and anyways, by that time the agent had a checklist to run through, likely including the passport numbers etc. as mentioned in the article.
Even knowing that the bills are being sold in sheets, you wouldn't want to be the agent who let someone go who was doing everything exactly as Woz did except for getting the currency sheets from the guy printing the North Korean superbills...