Hungarian farmer swindled when boy buys sheep with non-existing 54,000-forint bills

Dumb answers to a 54,000 forint question

Budapest Times
Sunday, 07 December 2008

A 17-year-old boy swindled a farmer out of three sheep by paying with fake banknotes, the police announced last Wednesday. The crime was all the more audacious because the 54,000-forint banknotes were of a denomination that does not even exist.



The 62-year old who sold the sheep was happy to accept HUF 108,000 after agreeing a price of HUF 100,000 (EUR 203.17). He only realised he had been cheated when he tried to change the bills at his local post office in the central Hungarian village of Kétpó. He waited two days before telling the police.

The police arrested the boy that bought the sheep at his home in the same village. They found a further 23 of the fake notes during a search of his home. The fakes appear to have been made by scanning a 20,000 forint note, then doctoring the image on a computer before printing. The boy claimed he had found the notes on a rubbish tip.

Yet this was not the end of the story. A spokeswoman for Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County police, Rita Szabó, said that another youth had been caught in the county town of Szolnok after using a fistful of 54,000-forint notes to buy a horse. The unwitting seller only realised that she had been tricked when she tried to change the unusual denomination bills at a bank.

The second suspect gave the police a similar story to that of the Kétpó sheep buyer, claiming to have found the dubious banknotes on the same Szolnok rubbish tip. Szabó said the police were trying to establish whether the two suspects knew each other, and to find the producer of the bizarre cash.

The police will also have to establish whether the creation of a “banknote” that does not even exist even counts as forgery under Hungarian law.