It’s tempting to write off the hapless businessmen who fell for this Australian money doubling scheme as naive or gullible. But if you look at the details, it’s pretty clear they were just stupid. And as comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

It seems four different business owners were conned out of between $10k and $120k when they fell for what amounts to a cheap magic trick to duplicate currency. The trick made it appear to these rocket scientists that soaking a $100 bill in a chemical bath caused the bill to undergo some sort of monetary mitosis, resulting in two identical $100 bills. Not be be complete buffoons, they did at least have the good sense to have a bank verify the authenticity of the “duplicated” bill to be sure it was not detectable as counterfeit. Yet it never occurred to any of them that soaking an inanimate object and magically getting it to replicate itself was technically dubious.

This is why science education is important. Heck, I think a little common sense would have sufficed.