This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. In 2008, Bernie Madoff was busted for running what's considered to be the largest financial fraud in history.

But ask any of his victims, and they'll tell you, hey, he seemed like a trustworthy guy.

Trust has always been a critical part of the U.S. economy, but sometimes it's worked in interesting ways.

There was a saying among businessmen at this time that they preferred a counterfeit note on a reputable bank than a genuine note on a fraudulent bank.

We're looking back at the long veiled history of American deception. We'll hear about a mermaid that helped rewrite the rules of Chicanery.

Something that looks like a kind of fossilized or petrified monkey corpse in a kind of scene of agony.

And...

Wonder Woman!

A superhero you cannot deceive. Coming up on backstory.

Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guy.

Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Balla, 20th Century Guy, and I'm here with Ed Ayers, not he's Century Guy, and Peter Onough, our resident, 18th Century Guy.

We're going to begin today back in the 1820s. There were a lot of things that were different back then from today.

One of them was the money that people carried in their wallets. It wasn't printed by the federal government.

It was printed by private banks. And when we say private banks, we're not talking bank of America.

A lot of these were fly-by-night operations, and each had its own currency designs, which meant there were hundreds of different currencies circulating.

That made life a lot harder for merchants, and a heck of a lot easier for counterfeiters.

And so let's say that you're a storekeeper.

This is Stephen Memm, a historian at the University of Georgia.

And someone comes in, you don't know who they are. They hand you a bill on, say, the Bank of Utica. It's a $3 bill.

And you want to know whether it's counterfeit or not.

If you were a savvy merchant, you'd whip out a little book called a counterfeit detector.

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