Georgia women teach Fayetteville how not to run a counterfeiting ring

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jul/9907moneyartist.htm

Boggs's shtick has an undeniable appeal. In its basic form, which has been widely reported on, it goes something like this: Boggs does an extremely precise and realistic drawing of one side of a banknote on high-quality paper, taking care to incorporate playful idiosyncrasies clearly indicating that the bill is not intended to deceive. (A bill might bear the stamp of the "Federal Observe Bank of Bohemia," for example, or might be signed by "J.S.G. Boggs, Secret of the Treasury.") He then attempts to use this bill to pay for goods or services of some sort, but only after making it plain that what he is offering as payment is not money but rather a work of art -- which, he points out, must have some kind of value, surely, because drawing it took a lot of time and skill. (And money, for that matter, since the paper and pens and inks needed to produce the notes don't come cheap. "It costs me a goddamn fortune to draw these bills," Boggs tells Weschler.) Boggs then announces that he is arbitrarily assigning to his bill the dollar value that he has drawn on it, and leaves it up to his befuddled victim whether to accept the bill or demand "real" payment, which Boggs also offers.

If the bill is accepted, Boggs demands exact change and a receipt, and then, before handing the bill over, annotates it with the details of the transaction. A few days later -- after the recipient of the bill has had, Boggs says, "some time, unbothered, to think about what's just transpired" -- Boggs sells the receipt and the change (for considerably more than the face value of the bill in question) to one of the many art dealers who hunger after his work. The dealer goes off in search of the person who has the bill, in order to try to buy it (for considerably more than its face value) and then sell all the elements of the transaction (at a considerable markup) to a collector or a museum. Boggs likes to point out that somewhere along the line the work of art shifts from being the bill itself to being the series of transactions that the bill has set in motion.