The Man Who Made a Bank Print Him Real Money

Artur Alves Reis pulled off the Portugal Bank Note fraud of 1925 - one of the most audacious cons in fraud history. He did not counterfeit a single note. He forged a contract and the signatures of Bank of Portugal officials to trick Waterlow and Sons of London, the respectable firm that actually printed Portugal's money, into running him off a fortune in genuine 500-escudo banknotes. Same plates, same presses, an unauthorized duplicate run of the real thing - roughly a hundred million escudos, about a million pounds, an enormous slice of a whole nation's money supply. I'm Eddie, and I take history's greatest swindles apart from the inside for the sheer nerve of them - then I remember who paid. Reis grew fabulously rich, bought a bank, and even tried to buy control of the Bank of Portugal itself, until duplicate serial numbers gave him away and he was arrested in December 1925. The fallout helped shove a fragile republic toward a coup and, eventually, dictatorship, and it ruined the London printer in a famous court case. This is cautionary history, not a how-to and not financial advice - where the sources disagree or the figures are estimates, I say so out loud. Chapters: 0:00 A Bank Printed His Money 0:38 Meet Eddie 1:42 The Undertaker's Ambitious Son 4:36 A Country Broke and Shaky 7:15 Forging the Permission 9:55 Fooling the Printer 12:49 Real Money, Not Counterfeit 15:04 A Fortune From Nothing 16:49 Washing It Through a Bank 19:45 He Tried to Buy the Bank 21:30 Two Notes, One Serial Number 24:33 The Country Pays 27:35 Prison, Ruin, and a Poor Death 30:56 The Wall Made of Paper Sources & further reading: the story of Artur Virgilio Alves Reis and the Portuguese Bank Note Crisis of 1925 is told at length in Murray Teigh Bloom's "The Man Who Stole Portugal." Core facts: Reis forged authorization documents to commission a duplicate print run of 500-escudo notes (bearing the explorer Vasco da Gama) from the London security printer Waterlow and Sons; the scheme produced on the order of 200,000 notes, roughly 100 million escudos or about one million pounds sterling, reportedly close to one percent of Portugal's economic output at the time - these totals are the commonly cited estimates and vary between accounts. He laundered the money through his own Bank of Angola and Metropole and moved to acquire a controlling interest in the Bank of Portugal. Duplicate serial numbers exposed the fraud; Reis was arrested in December 1925. The Bank of Portugal recalled the entire 500-escudo note and later won a landmark British lawsuit against Waterlow and Sons. The scandal is widely regarded as one of several factors that helped destabilize the First Portuguese Republic ahead of the 1926 coup and the later rise of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar; historians debate how large a factor it was. Reis served around twenty years and died poor in Lisbon in 1955.