CHASING COUNTERFEITERS IN COLOMBIA

On the day of the raid, a convoy of vehicles with armed troops escorted Prieto's team, which traveled in several pickup trucks. Soldiers on motorbikes led the caravan in the morning twilight, driving along a dirt path to a cannabis farm, the site of the suspected counterfeiting plant. At a large house on the premises, six people still slept — until the motorcycle roars woke them. They tried to escape, Prieto later told me, but five of them were caught right away. The one who fled was never captured.

Inside the house, Prieto and his colleagues found counterfeit currency with a face value of $1.6 million in uncut sheets of $50 bills printed on high-quality paper. Prieto's team seized the printing plates used for the forgery, as well as an inkjet printer, a paper cutter, a bill counter and an assortment of inks. The officers, while videotaping themselves so they would have evidence to present in court, then took a sledgehammer to the lithographic printing press the counterfeiters had been using. Investigators sometimes do this because an offset press, weighing around 1,000 pounds and usually bolted to the floor, can be too difficult to cart away as evidence. "It was left as scrap metal," Prieto says.

In parts of Latin America, producing fake dollars is widely seen as a low-risk, high-reward crime. While some of the counterfeit currency is smuggled into the United States, a larger share ends up circulating in local economies across the region. Ecuador, El Salvador and Panama — Latin American countries where the U.S. dollar is the official currency — are especially attractive destinations. Counterfeit notes function as real money, changing hands for goods and services, until the forgery is detected. Whoever ends up in possession of the note at that moment of discovery, which often happens while someone is trying to make a bank deposit, suffers the loss.

Counterfeiting in Colombia had been significantly curtailed by the early 2010s, after years of efforts by specialized units in the Colombian National Police and the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia that worked with the U.S. Secret Service. But the crime has been proliferating in the country in recent years, driven by technological advances. "Most counterfeit that we see produced in the United States tends to be amateurish — somebody buys a Xerox machine over at Walmart, and then they start Xeroxing $100 bills in their hotel room," Benigno Pereda, a Secret Service agent who was based in Bogotá at the time of the raid, told me. "But the counterfeit down here is very sophisticated." The proceeds sometimes finance other criminal activities like human trafficking, drug smuggling and terrorism.

Counterfeiters have been setting up their operations in jungles and remote areas controlled by Colombian rebel groups, which collect a protection tax from the criminals in return for providing them a haven. These are parts of the country where law enforcement faces considerable risks. As Pereda puts it: "No one wants to get killed over funny money."

For months, Prieto and his team gathered information about the artist known as Ysraeli. They learned that he wasn't from Israel but was a 39-year-old Colombian named Asher Ariayu Rodriguez who had recently embraced Judaism and added Ysraeli to his name. The Office of the Attorney General of Colombia gave the investigators permission to wiretap his phone, which finally enabled them to pinpoint where he lived in Cali. Early one morning in July 2024, well before the sun came up, the officers knocked on his door. Rodriguez was at home, and he let them in without any resistance.

A strong smell of ink permeated the house. Rodriguez willingly showed the investigators his equipment. In the living room, he had a lithographic printing press, an inkjet printer, an assortment of commercial-grade inks and other paraphernalia. Prieto and his officers also discovered more than $900,000 in counterfeit $50 bills.

A bearded, heavyset man, Rodriguez was recovering from an ankle injury that forced him to walk on crutches. He showed the investigators the computer and USB drive on which he kept the digital designs for producing the counterfeit notes. Searching through his computer, investigators saw that Rodriguez was a methodical and meticulous artist.

It was clear that Rodriguez took pride in his work as an artist. "He wanted to make the perfect bill," Prieto said. Trying to design a flawless bank note, he told investigators, was a passion that helped him relax. He said that achieving perfection was, in fact, his primary motive and that the resulting bills were meant to be used only as movie money — the kind used as props on film sets. (That defense is not uncommon among counterfeiters.)

A court rejected those explanations. In 2025, he was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of counterfeiting currency. He has appealed the verdict.

To read the complete article, see:
The Hunt for the Counterfeiter Trying to Make the Perfect Bill (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/magazine/counterfeit-dollars.html)

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