Jinger Duggar’s husband, Jeremy Vuolo, is recalling his close call with the law.
“This is crazy, I gotta tell all of you guys this story because this has never happened to me,” Vuolo began on the Wednesday, August 20, episode of the “Jinger & Jeremy Vuolo” podcast, explaining that the couple had a friend who was visiting from out of state. “They had a car on our property that they were selling. So one of the college kids was helping them sell it. A guy shows up at the house who was wild.”
He continued, “The guy selling it is like, ‘This guy is crazy.’ But he’s here to buy the car. So they make the exchange, the guy gives him $6,000 in cash. Not very expensive cars, used old car. But I needed to get that money to our friend out of state.”
Vuolo explained that he took the $6,000 in cash to the bank with plans to deposit the money and send the friend a wire transfer.
“As I’m depositing the money, the machine would stop halfway through,” Vuolo said. “It stops. I’m looking at the lady, she goes, ‘Oh,’ takes a bill out. I’m looking at the machine. It says, ‘Suspect document.’ I’m like, ‘What?’”
Vuolo noted that the woman took the cash out again before putting it back — only to get the same results.
“I’m going, ‘What is going on?’ in my head. She looks at the other teller. There’s people around. She goes, ‘We’ve got counterfeit money here,’” he recalled. “I’m like, ‘What?’ She does it five times. $500 of counterfeit money. I’m sitting there shocked at the bank. All this stuff going through my head like, ‘They think I’m trying to deposit fake money.’”
He continued, “So of course, I give my dumb excuses, like, ‘Yeah, my buddy was selling a car. This was the cash from the car,’” thinking they don’t believe me. They’re just going, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard that one before.’ I’m fascinated by this.”
Vuolo recalled that a man next to him at the bank who was also trying to make a deposit became “fascinated” by the ordeal.
“I’m standing there at the counter with $6,000 and all of these counterfeit bills being pulled out by the bank teller. I’m just thinking, ‘I’m done. They’re going to bring in the cops, they’re going to do an investigation. They’re going to run fingerprints or whatever,’” Vuolo said. “It ended up not being that because the money was so obviously fake. The teller had let me feel it, it was just regular paper.”
Vuolo explained that the teller had to write a report on each individual bill, noting that the bank had seen counterfeit money before but “nothing like this.” Vuolo quipped, “I’m sitting there, just the spectacle at the bank.”
Duggar noted that she received a text from Vuolo, who prompted her to search the internet to figure out what could happen to someone depositing counterfeit money. Duggar explained that she learned if someone was “knowingly” trying to deposit the counterfeit money, it could lead to up to 20 years in prison and a “hefty fine.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, my word.’ Like, ‘What in the world?’” Duggar recalled.
Vuolo, meanwhile, asked the teller if he could have a seat while she filed the report. “So I bolted out the door. No, I’m kidding,” Vuolo quipped.
Five minutes later, the teller came back to Vuolo and informed him the cash was actually “movie money.”
“Because it’s actually play money — it’s not legal tender or whatever — she’s like, ‘We don’t have to do a report.’ Because it’s essentially a toy, it’s categorized as a toy,” he recalled. “You can buy $20,000 of movie money on Amazon for $50. It’s very clearly not the real thing. … Instead of saying, ‘In God we trust,’ it says, ‘In props we trust.’ All over the place it has, ‘For motion picture purposes only.’”
Ultimately, the teller gave the money back to Vuolo, who had to then call his friend and break the news that he was “out $500.”
“I think he sold it to someone on Facebook Marketplace or something. So there’s no way to really find that guy that did it,” Vuolo said. “So now I’m just wondering, did that guy do it intentionally? If so, why didn’t he try to save more money? If you’re willing to lie and cheat, why only $500 of the $6,000?”
