Motueka man sentenced for making fake money in motel

From a motel room, Thomas McCabe used a guillotine, printer and laptop to manufacture counterfeit banknotes.

But, the 27-year-old was sprung when the motel cleaner found bunches of screwed up paper, opened them and found printed $20 counterfeit notes.

The discovery came after a shopping spree in which McCabe used fake money to buy goods worth hundreds of dollars from various stores.

In the Nelson District Court on Tuesday he was sentenced to two years and five months in prison for what Judge Tony Snell described as offending that undermined our currency.

“This was a serious example of it,” he said.

McCabe was sentenced on the lead charges linked to the counterfeiting and possession of instruments used to make the fake bank notes. He received concurrent sentences on charges he earlier admitted to, including using forged documents, burglary, shoplifting and unlawfully being in a yard.

The forgery counts stemmed from the change he was given when he twice bought goods using $100 counterfeit notes, before his partner, charged as a co-offender, allegedly booked the motel room in April this year.

On April 18, he went to the Tasman General Store and selected $25.40 worth of goods, which he paid for with a fake $100 note. He was given $74.60 in change and left the store. It wasn’t until the store owner did the banking later that day that he learned the note was counterfeit.

McCabe and his co-offender then checked into a Nelson motel.

The police summary of facts said that over two nights, McCabe used the guillotine, printer and laptop to manufacture counterfeit banknotes.

When they checked out on April 22, the cleaner found screwed-up papers, opened them and discovered printed $20 counterfeit notes.

She also found bits of shredded paper that looked to be the colour of $50 bank notes, police said.

The offending was preceded by a crime spree including one in March this year when McCabe went to the Mitre 10 Mega Store in Nelson with an associate and put three packs of rechargeable batteries in a pocket of his trousers.

The associate found a store scanner and handed it to McCabe, who put the item in his jacket pocket.

When they were approached by store security, McCabe handed over the scanner, was verbally trespassed, and walked out of the store without paying for the batteries.

He told police he had “found” the scanner and intended to hand it over at the checkout but admitted to stealing the batteries.

Three days later, McCabe was in the Repco store in Motueka when he took a $264 set of LED headlights, which he stuffed down the front of his jeans while pretending to adjust his waistband, then walked out of the store with his T-shirt pulled down over his jeans.

Then, in the early hours of April 7 this year, McCabe was caught on CCTV driving to the Moutere Hills Community Centre in Tasman, where he walked around the property and took various items before leaving.

On the morning of May 3, McCabe was seen on CCTV entering a yard in Motueka on his scooter, pulling up to the front door of the premises, from where he uplifted a courier parcel and left.

McCabe, a beneficiary with 20 previous convictions since 2016 including eight for dishonesty, was arrested after the police searched his home and found a printer with a banknote sizing template in the kitchen plus two counterfeit $50 notes.

Judge Snell acknowledged McCabe’s mother, who had returned some of the items stolen by McCabe in separate burglary matters.

From a starting point of an adjusted three years and seven months in prison, factoring in uplifts, McCabe was given a 35% discount for his guilty pleas and in recognition of a methamphetamine addiction which was a key driver in his offending.

McCabe was also given a small discount for his remorse, which Judge Snell believed was genuine, to arrive at the end sentence of two years and five months.

An order was made for the destruction of all the counterfeit banknotes and equipment used to make them.

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.