Instead of robbing or stealing directly, some criminals prefer to make fake bills β that way, not only do they not have to pay for whatever they're "buying", they get real money back as change. It can be anywhere from one dude operating a low-grade printer out of his garage to a gang using a top-end press making super-bills.
Sometimes, this extends to creating fake coins as well. In other words, " Screw the rules, I make my own money! Counterfeiting rings tend to be popular villains for Kid Detectives and other G-rated heroes, since the crime is serious enough to call for legitimate secrecy and cunning, but not instantly synonymous with Family-Unfriendly Violence like robbery or drug-dealing.
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That said, don't expect every counterfeiter fictional or otherwise to be a pushover ; it takes a lot of muscle to carry all those printing plates, after all Counterfit coins appear in traditional iterations of the 12 Coins Puzzle. Compare Magical Counterfeiting , where money or other items of value are duplicated by magical means rather than messing about with coin stamps or printing plates.
One chapter of Case Closed had Conan end up on the trail of a group of counterfeiters who had kidnapped one of his classmates' brothers; another had an old counterfeiter who'd hidden his work in an abandoned house when his conscience caught up to him. One Gunsmith Cats manga arc had counterfeit plates and treasury-grade paper as its MacGuffin. Bean destroys them after he learns that the man paying him to deliver the goods was planning to pay him from the first production run instead of in real money.
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One episode of Super Milk Chan had Milk and Tetsuko given the mission to find a counterfeiter who was printing his money so he could buy waffles. Zipang features the heroes producing a large amount of fake Imperial Japanese occupation currency the so-called "banana currency" to discretely buy supplies with from the contemporary black market.
