A closer look
Notorious counterfeiter Artur Alves dos Reis nearly destroyed the entire Portuguese economy in 1925 by brilliantly forging official central bank contracts rather than actually trying to physically forge the highly complex national currency itself. He successfully tricked the highly secure London printing firm that legally manufactured Portugal's actual money into legally printing him massive quantities of completely authentic banknotes, eventually secretly taking control of roughly one percent of the nation's entire gross domestic product. He aggressively used his massive influx of literally real but highly unauthorized cash to secretly buy controlling shares in the central bank itself, desperately hoping to permanently cover up his massive financial crimes from the inside before anyone noticed. He basically executed the most chaotic and hilariously aggressive hostile corporate takeover in global financial history, definitively proving that the most effective way to rob a national bank is to just politely ask the official manufacturers to print you some extra bills
