$300M Fake $100 Pipeline — Secret Service Raided This Print Shop

Case File: Riverside Counterfeit Print Shop — $67M Seizure, 3-State Pipeline Dismantled 3:17 a.m. March 9th, 2026. Riverside, California. Fourteen Secret Service agents moved through a parking lot toward a commercial print shop on Indiana Avenue. Headlights off. Suppressed radios. Two armored vehicles blocked the only exit. Inside: sixty-seven million dollars in finished hundred-dollar bills. Two large-format offset presses still warm. A server recording outbound shipments in real time. And four suspects who had no idea the case against them had begun not with a wiretap or an informant — but with a routine IRS audit in a Long Beach field office five months earlier. This is Operation Paper Trail. A three-year counterfeit production and distribution network built inside a legitimate Southern California print shop — and the thread that unraveled it. CHAPTERS 00:00 Indiana Avenue — The 3:17 a.m. Breach at Cordova Print Solutions 02:45 The IRS Flag — How 32 Tons of Missing Cotton-Linen Paper Started the Case 06:30 Thermal Warrant and Night-Shift Anomalies — Secret Service Surveillance, October–November 2025 10:15 The White Van and the Three-State Distribution Network — San Bernardino, Las Vegas, and Beyond 14:00 Dennis Hollis and Patricia Avalos — Tracking the Technician and the Financial Controller 17:30 The Takedown and What Was Left Behind — Fugitives, $100M Still in Circulation WHY THIS MATTERS Cordova Print Solutions produced an estimated two million dollars per week in counterfeit currency — bills Federal Reserve analysts rated as the highest-quality domestic counterfeits seen in over a decade — and did so for nearly three years without triggering a single law-enforcement flag. The investigation only began because a thirty-one-year-old IRS revenue agent noticed that a small print shop was buying forty-one tons of cotton-linen paper against a legitimate job volume that could account for nine. The case illustrates how a supply-chain paper trail can expose an operation that evaded every direct investigative tripwire, and why the $260–$300 million in counterfeit bills already in circulation when the raid occurred represents an ongoing challenge the Federal Reserve is still quietly managing through commercial-bank deposit checks. TOPICS COVERED • How IRS revenue agent Carla Mendoza's random audit of Cordova Print Solutions LLC in Long Beach exposed a cotton-linen paper discrepancy — 41 tons purchased against 9 tons of legitimate output • Secret Service Counterfeit Division surveillance methodology: thermal imaging warrants, pen registers, and license-plate readers at the Indiana Avenue print shop, October–November 2025 • The three-state distribution network linking Riverside to self-storage units in San Bernardino and a private mail center in Las Vegas via white panel vans registered to a Nevada shell company • How former Bureau of Engraving and Printing contractor Dennis Hollis — traced through a 74-name BEP technician list — provided currency-grade intaglio plate-making capability that should not have been commercially available • Patricia Avalos and the Henderson shell-company structuring: $14 million in sub-threshold deposits across three Reno-registered holding companies, uncovered after a joint Secret Service, FBI, and IRS Criminal Investigation task force subpoena on February 4, 2026 • The serial-numbering repetition flaw — the only detectable defect in otherwise near-perfect hundred-dollar bills — and how Treasury analysts identified it from circulating cash deposits • What remained after the raid: Hollis and Eduardo Restrepo at large, an estimated $80–100 million in high-grade counterfeits still circulating, and plate-making equipment recovered from a soundproofed sub-basement that had not appeared on the building's official floor plan SOURCES Patterns referenced: DOJ press releases (justice.gov), unsealed federal indictments (pacer.uscourts.gov), Secret Service and FBI field-office reporting (fbi.gov), FinCEN currency-reporting records (fincen.gov), and Wikipedia historical pattern entries (en.wikipedia.org). This is a dramatized reconstruction. Names, dates, and operational details are drawn from publicly available court filings and agency statements. #FederalCase #CounterfeitCurrency #SecretServiceRaid