Magical Counterfeiting

Magic-users aren't often strapped for cash, are they? Perhaps it's because they know how to print their own money?

Or at least how to make something look like money?

Oftentimes the magically produced money will vanish or change back after the makers spend it, potentially getting them in trouble if they come back that way later.

This is a favored trick of trickster-types throughout cultures that have invented money, The Fair Folk and Youkai in particular. Compare All That Glitters. See Also: Transmutation and Midas Touch.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Fullmetal Alchemist: Transmuting gold is actually fairly easy for alchemists to do, but it's highly illegal because it would destabilize the economy. In one chapter, Ed transmutes a couple tons of mining waste into gold and uses it to buy the mine from its corrupt owner, and then transmutes it back after reselling the mine to the miners.
  • In the 2003 anime making gold requires a philosopher's stone, so Ed uses the gold from a bag of coins to coat several bars of coal.
• In Gugure Kokkuri San Shigaraki tries the old tanuki trick of making a leaf look like a banknote on Kohina.
• My Hero Academia: Attempted. In one of Kirishima's flashbacks about going to school with Ashido, he was unable to help a kid whose quirk made him turn leaves into money from being dragged away by bullies to make them some fake money. Ashido, on the other hand, managed to somehow resolve the situation just by chatting them up and having them dance with her.
• In Pom Poko, the tanuki are tested on their transformation skills by being sent out into the human world to return with the equivalent of $10. One tanuki tries to pass off a bunch of leaves as money, but the trick doesn't work on other tanuki.
• Someday's Dreamers Yume tries to thank Zennosuke for helping her by generating large sums of cash for him. She only succeeds at offending him, and later learns that generating currency with her magic is strictly forbidden.
• Spirited Away: The ghostly No-Face (Kaonashi) manages to enter Yubaba's bathhouse. There, No-Face lavishly rewards the staff with gold nuggets for bringing goodies. Yubaba hears about this, berates her underlings for allowing No-Face entry, and reminds them that the gold is worthless. Sure enough, the nuggets revert to useless sludge, meaning everyone had been busting hump for nothing.

Comic Books

• The Sandman (1989): One issue depicts William Shakespeare's theatre troupe performing A Midsummer Night's Dream for an audience of The Fair Folk, including the originals of King Oberon and Queen Titania. Richard Burbage, the lead actor of the troupe, has the effrontery to hit up King Auberon for a contribution to the troupe's running costs. After lampshading Burbage's lack of Genre Savvy, Auberon gives him a bag full of gold coins which have all turned into yellow leaves when Burbage opens it again the next day.

Fan Works

• Defied in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, where Professor McGonagall explains to her Transfiguration class, in the very first lesson, that the goblin nation is legally in a permanent state of war with any and all magical counterfeiters.
  Professor McGonagall: They will not send Aurors. They will send an army.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): An interesting case; Soma's Mimic soul allows him to generate money whenever he gets injured, and he has two other souls that allow him to heal from his injuries. Unfortunately, that money only comes in American Pennies, and he lives in Japan. The only way he can take advantage of that money is to exchange it through Soma's Friend in the Black Market, and even so he and his friends have to keep themselves in check to avoid Suspicious Spending.
• Spellbound (Lilafly): When Sabrina and her father are fleeing from Paris and worried about money, Mélusine advises them to just put glamours on some leaves and acorns and pass them off as money. He isn't keen to break the law, but Mélusine is unsympathetic.
  Mélusine: I cannot offer you money nor a job. Would you prefer to starve?
• Vow of Nudity: In one story, Fiora the Witch uses alchemy to turn wooden coins into silver for purchasing supplies to get her and Haara home.

Films — Live-Action

• In Gate 2: The Trespassers, a group of teens summon forth a diminutive, demonic minion from Hell which they discover will do their bidding and grant their wishes. They use the demon's power to acquire all sorts of things for themselves, including loads of money, but they eventually discover for themselves that the material items they wish for do not stay that way forever and eventually turn to (literal) shit. This becomes a very big problem for a pair of the teens when they run up a large bill at an upscale restaurant only to discover the money that they wished for is now a disgusting sludge.
• There's a character in the film Push, Hook, who is called a "Shifter," meaning he has the psychic ability to cast a glamour around any object and make it appear however he wants. In one instance, he's shown using his power to turn a plain slip of paper into a large unit of Chinese yuan. This effect is temporary and the illusion eventually wears off.

Gamebooks

• The gamebook, The Citadel of Chaos have you playing as a wizard with an assortment of spells, one being the Fool's Gold - an illusion spell that creates fake gold and treasure from out of nothing, which you can use for bribing and purchasing items. The effects are only temporary and the treasure disappears after a short while.
• Sorcery! have the appropriately-named DUD spell, which turns useless objects into gold until the wizard who casted it is out of sight.

Literature

• In an Italian fairy tale called "Bambolina", collected by Luigi Capuana, a fisherman sells his daughter to an evil mermaid for a basketful of gold. The next day, he finds out the coins only appear as gold while in the basket or in his pocket; when he tries to buy something, they are nothing but seashells.
• Filthy Henry: The Fairy Detective pays for most things using leaves that are temporarily bewitched to look like money. He can't deposit these into his bank account because banks are secretly run by leprechauns who'd be able to tell.
• In various novels by Mercedes Lackey, the Fae are capable of kenning: making perfect copies of any object given one real one. As the stories progress towards the modern era, this becomes less and less useful for making money - in the 16th Century, money was coins, and all the man on the street cared about was the face on the engraving and metal content, which kenning could easily replicate. In the 20th Century, coins aren't worth much anymore, and people tend to ask questions if you try to spend a hundred totally identical $20 bills in the same place - kenned bills are so perfectly identical to each other that they all carry the same serial number as the original, making it obvious that the money is fake.
• Discworld
  • A Running Gag in the novels concerns what fairy gold turns into in the morning. Or indeed any money created by magic. Apparently there is one renegade Wizard who is still being pursued by Chrysoprase The Troll after paying his gambling debts in fairy gold and then using the time before the next day's dawn to get as far away as possible.
  • Subverted by the payment the Auditors of Reality make to the Assassins' Guild in Hogfather, which consists of three million blank discs of pure gold, which just materialises in the vaults. The Guild treasurer believes this trope is in effect, but Lord Downey reflects that if they were magical fakes, they'd look like real coins, whereas actual gold doesn't need to convince you of its value.
• In Firestarter Charlie's father uses his powers to make a one-dollar bill appear as five hundred when taking a taxi.
• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Leprechaun gold disappears after a few hours. Ludo Bagman paid out Fred and George's longshot Quidditch bet in leprechaun gold gathered from the Irish team's mascots, leading them to try blackmailing him.
• In the Imager Portfolio, talented Imagers can magic up coins. In the chronologically later books, getting caught doing so once officially registered as an Imager in the Collegium in a felony that carries the death penalty.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's 1940 Mundane Fantastic novella Magic, Inc., a practical joker at a Chamber of Commerce meeting tries to pay a ten-cent fine with a magically-made fake coin, but it immediately melts away when it hits Cold Iron.
• In The Master and Margarita, Korovyev does it twice: the bribe he gives to the apartment block's administrator turns from rubles to dollars, and the money thrown to the audience at the Varieties theatre turns into random items the next day. When the evening's receipts are delivered to the bank the next day, they become the currencies of several Central European states.
• Averted in "No Need for a Core??". While Living Dungeons are quite capable of reproducing coinage exactly, experience has taught the elder of the two cores to only create raw metals or finished goods, never currency. A stable economy for the local kingdom(s) is good for a dungeon's health; you want a steady flow of trainees and experienced adventurers, not desperate armies of ragtag people.
• In October Daye, Toby sometimes uses her fae magic to turn random objects like mushrooms into just how much change she needs at the moment.
• In One Hundred Years Ahead, Jolly U and Rat are stuck on modern Earth without local money. Rat says he can make any amount with his illusion powers, but Jolly U states "I know your money, it'll dissolve as soon as we're five steps away".
• Ivan Krylov: "A Poor Rich Man" has a poor man be given a purse that will always contain a gold coin no matter how many he pulls out, but he must throw the purse away before spending a single one or else they'll all turn into pebbles. The man pulls out huge piles of gold, but becomes haunted by the idea that he won't have enough for the rest of his life, and ends up begging as he did before he had the purse and dies without having ever spent a coin of his riches.
• The Scholomance: It's easy for almost any decent mage to create a fifty-dollar bill or simply coax an electronic transaction into going through, hence why Magical Society prefers to trade in magical resources. It also adds insult to injury when elite wizards pay their contractors in mundane money.
• One of the side books of The Spiderwick Chronicles has a Double Subversion. Spiderwick mentions having a run-in with a leprechaun who gives him what appear to be golden sunflower seeds, which turn normal after a day. However, when he cracks them open, he sees that they contained tiny nuggets of gold.
• When The Stainless Steel Rat arrives on Dirt, the fabled mother-world of humanity^note Earth, he uses the technology of his world to create exact duplicate copies of US dollars he has just extracted from a local troglodyte. He marvels at these people being so astoundingly primitive that they make their money out of easily-forged paper. Of course, considering the small sample of US dollar notes, each is an exact perfect copy of the original right down to the fact they all carry exactly the same serial number, but he knows how little these are looked at.
• Strata by Terry Pratchett has a future society that's sent into crisis when a counterfeit of their supposedly uncounterfeitable currency shows up. It's described as a Magic from Technology version of fairy gold.
• In the Sword of Truth series, it is quite possible to transform silver and copper coins into gold, though it is stated to be dangerous magic.
• There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns: Dungeons that have unlocked the relevant metals can make coins from mana quite easily. However, since the coins are ultimately made of magic, they will gradually degrade once removed from the dungeon. Whether they're acceptable legal tender depends on where you live.
• War for the Oaks: The phouka uses disappearing fairy gold (in a modern form, hundred-dollar bills that will revert to dry leaves) to buy Eddi a motorcycle. When she realizes what he's done she makes it clear that is not okay, even if the guy he did it to is a jerk, and makes her point by urging the phouka to consider the possible impact on uninvolved bystanders if, for example, the guy were to spend or hand on some of the cash before the magic wears off.
• In the biography of the famed hypnotist Wolf Messing, it is described how, as a child, he made a train conductor see a random piece of paper as the ticket he didn't have, and later, made a Soviet bank worker have a heart attack by making a blank paper appear as a receipt by which he got a hundred thousand rubles. The reason this isn't in the Real Life folder is because a lot of the biography was proved to be Based on a Great Big Lie: for example, in the second case, the Soviet bank worker being handed the receipt, according to the rules, would have had no access to the money.
• Zeroes: In the second book, the Zeroes run afoul of a man with power to illusion slips of paper to look like dollar bills for a short while. Coin's superpower lets him make people temporarily mistake blank paper for money. It affects people's minds rather than the money itself, absolutely convincing them that it's genuine no matter what test they subject it to... at least, right up until he leaves, at which point the power wears off and they realize what they're actually holding.

Myths and Legends

• The Fair Folk are known to place a Glamour over clumps of sticks and dirt to make them look like coins.
• Tanuki in Japanese folklore are known pranksters who possess the power of illusion, able to disguise themselves and objects as different things. A recurring tale among supposed victims of the tanuki claim that a supposedly normal person (a tanuki in disguise as a human) would pay them for goods and/or services, only for that money to turn into leaves and rocks long afterwards. Despite this, tanuki are considered to be symbols of economic prosperity, many Japanese businesses today having statue depictions outside their door for good luck.
• Like Tanuki, Kitsune also have the ability to change pebbles and leaves into what look like coins and paper currency, only for it to transform back once they change back from human form. Often, how they spend their transformed currency reflects their nature; a benevolent Kitsune will use their ability to punish a dishonest merchant (such as by buying their goods at an inflated price) while a more malevolent Kitsune will use their currency to rip off an honest merchant.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost: There's a Goblin Contract (a spell with a built-in drawback) that lets a changeling alter an object's appearance temporarily. It's easier to change a small bill into a larger bill than to change complete trash into currency. The catch is that, when the contract wears off, the person given the fake object will magically know who tried to screw them over.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Basic Dungeons & Dragons supplement The Book of Marvelous Magic. The magical Plate of Counterfeiting can create one gold piece of any type per day, including a counterfeit version of an existing government's gold coin.
  • According to the 5e sourcebook "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes", the Arch Devil Glasya bought her way into a position of power using lead that had been transmuted into gold via alchemy. As soon as she had what she wanted, she reverted the transformation, leaving her backers with nothing, then manipulated the bureaucracy of Hell to place herself beyond their wrath.
  • The Book of Wonderous Inventions gives The Animated Money Changing Machine, operated by a Deep Gnome teller, who allows adventurers to exchange their large amount of coins with smaller light-weight gems, and provides a certificate of transaction. These gems are simply rocks with a permanent illusion spell cast on them, and the certificate is a simple forgery.
  • Many illusion spells can be used to make something look more valuable than it is. Silent Image can make a copper coin look like a platinum coin (worth 1000 copper coins) while Nystul’s Magic Aura can cause a nonmagical item to appear to be magical for 24 hours. Selling bogus magic items is a common use for it.
• Golden Sky Stories: The tanuki henge have a magical power to temporarily transmute leaves, acorns, etc. into reasonably convincing money (being nature spirits, most henge are quite shaky on what money even is), but it only works in the evening and at night, and the "money" reverts back to whatever it originally was as soon as the sun rises.
• GURPS Magical Items 3 describes an attempt by a criminal gang in the GURPS Technomancer world to produce a magical ATM card that would unquestioningly be accepted by any machine. What they ended up with was the Trick Coin, which is a real coin or banknote, but enchanted so that, when used in a vending machine, it will be returned after you make your purchase. It's very low-key as magical crime goes, but it's surprisingly effective.
• Magic: The Gathering: The card "Conjured Currency" uses this trope as its flavor. The art depicts an outstretched hand displaying money, but a reflection in a nearby window shows that it doesn't exist.
• Pathfinder: The bottom-level illusion spell "Fool's Gold" disguises copper or silver as gold for a few hours, increasing its perceived value up to a hundredfold. Careful appraisal can expose the fraud early.
• Warhammer Fantasy: The Lore of Metal can temporarily transform metal objects, including coinage, into a much more valuable form. Rumour holds that Supreme Patriarch Balthasar Gelt once paid a vindictive ship captain with fake gold and has had a bounty on his head ever since, but nobody would dare try to collect.

Video Games

• In Monster Seeking Monster, part of the fourth Jackbox Party Pack, a variation on this is the special power of the Leprechaun. Normally, when two players date, each one receives a heart. A player who dates a disguised Leprechaun receives two fake hearts, which vanish when the Leprechaun is revealed.
• Inverted in Klonoa Beach Volleyball. In Joka's ending, Joka decides that the prize money he won from the tournament isn't enough, so he uses his magic powers to make the money "increase by 10 times." Rather than multiply the money, the spell makes the dollars bigger and more valuable. Joka attempts to pay with one of these dollars at a store, but the storekeeper assumes the money is fake and threatens to call the police.
• In the backstory of Monster Sanctuary, the Guild of Alchemists hired a pirate captain to do a favor for them, paying him a small fortune in gold for his trouble. The "gold" became brittle and lost all its value about two weeks later.
• The "False Coin" spell in Ultima VII Part II does exactly what it sounds like, converting lead nuggets into gold coins. The manual attempts to handwave away the inflation that this should cause by claiming the magical coins eventually vanish, but this never happens in actual gameplay, and no NPC ever comes at you raging about how you've cheated them — False Coin coins are, as far as the game can tell, exactly the same as real money.

Web Animation

• In Epithet Erased, Ramsey has the Goldbricker Epithet, which gives him the power to temporarily turn things into gold. One of his trademark scams is to sell an item he's turned to gold, then get away before it turns back.
• Discussed in The Legend Of Luo Xiao Hei. One of the richest elfin in the setting and the owner of the luxurious Spirit Hall, Kali, mentions that supernatural creatures can make counterfeit money with magic, but he explains that it would make them all look too suspicious if they were carrying around more than what was circulating and would likely cause inflation. As such, he operates by human standards and instead is the richest person in the setting by legal means (he owns a stupidly successful paper trade company).

Western Animation

• One episode of Darkwing Duck featured Bushroot developing a money tree that grew counterfeit bills. In addition, when the bills were placed into vaults, they would sprout into vines and carry the safes full of real bills back to Bushroot.
• Discussed in the Fairly Oddparents episode, "Nectar of the Odds". When Timmy tries to devise a way to get tickets to see "Crash Nebula: On Ice", he suggests that Cosmo and Wanda poof up the money to buy the tickets. Wanda immediately shoots down this idea by saying that it's counterfeiting, to which Timmy sarcastically points out that it's bad. There's even a rule in Da Rules that is against using magic to wish for money as seen in a couple episodes.
• In Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, being fooled by this trick is the reason Herc is on the side of the heroes. After Gillian uses a trick that turns lead into gold as a "payment" to encourage Herc to get the others off the planet, Herc sees the fake money turn back into its original form. Now, he insists that he's only with the others until he gets his actual payment, though he has come to actually care for them throughout the series.

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