NEED TO KNOW
Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s husband, Jeremy Vuolo, is detailing why his recent visit to the bank led to a “close call” with the law.
On the latest episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, Jinger, 31, told her husband that she was “thankful that you’re not in jail right now” after the recent incident, before he detailed what happened.
“Had a close call with a person,” Jeremy, 37, said. “This is crazy. I gotta tell all of you guys the story because this has never happened to me.”
“Well, you’ve been in jail before,” Jinger jokingly told her husband as the pair laughed together. “For one day. One night.”
However, Jeremy didn’t think it was any laughing matter when he accidentally tried to deposit counterfeit money.
“So I go to the bank. We had a friend from out of state,” he recalled. “They had a car on our property that they were selling…And a guy shows up at the house, who was wild. And the guy selling it was like this guy’s crazy, but he’s here to buy the car. So they make the exchange.”
“The guy gives him $6,000 in cash. Not a very expensive car. It’s a used, old car. But, I needed to get that money to our friend out of state,” he continued. “So I take $6,000 cash to the bank, gonna deposit it and then send him a wire. And as I’m depositing the money, the machine would stop halfway through as the money’s going through, it stops.”
While the banker removed the bills from the machine, Jeremy realized the severity of the situation.
“I’m going, ‘What is going on?’” he said. “She looks at the other teller. There’s people around. She goes, ‘We’ve got counterfeit money here.’ I’m like, ‘What?’”
Jeremy recalled feeling “shocked” at the bank and making “dumb excuses” for the counterfeit money.
“And so I’m standing there at the counter with $6,000 and all of these counterfeit bills being pulled out by the bank teller,” he explained. “And I’m just thinking, I’m done. Like, they’re gonna bring in the cops. They’re gonna do an investigation. They’re gonna run fingerprints or whatever.”
However, he noted, “it ended up not being that bad because the money was so obviously fake,” adding, “The teller let me feel it. It was just regular paper.”
Jinger Vuolo/Instagram
Jeremy was required to stay at the bank while the teller made a report about the fraudulent bills, and other customers watched from afar.
He recalled feeling like a “spectacle at the bank.”
His wife, Jinger, revealed that when she used ChatGPT to look up what could happen to him in this situation, it revealed the “worst case scenario” was if a person tried knowingly to pass this counterfeit currency, it would “lead to federal charges up to twenty years in prison and a hefty fine.”
Jinger Vuolo/Instagram
Jeremy then showed pictures of the bill and the machine at the bank on his phone before sharing that he asked to take a seat while the teller worked on the report.
Once he received the OK to find a seat, he joked, “I bolted out the door. No, I’m kidding.”
Last month, Jeremy reflected on the trials and tribulations he and Jinger faced early in their marriage.
“The Lord has to teach everyone of us how to walk alone with him,” Jeremy explained on the couple’s podcast. “There was a time in our life very early on in our marriage, where we experienced some — I describe it as deep betrayal. Because you have relationships in your life that ground you, and when those shake or are removed, you feel like, ‘What am I doing?’”
When they met with their pastor about the situation, Jeremy recalled Jinger’s “deep tears” as he navigated his own tough emotions.
Jinger & Jeremy Vuolo/YouTube
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“There are times in life where the two of you will go through something and one of you will have this steadiness and the other is really struggling, so you’re coming alongside,” Jeremy acknowledged. “This was a moment when we were both very deeply unsettled, where it was like, we both felt that shaking.”
“I’ll never forget what he said,” he noted of the pastor’s advice. “He said, ‘Jeremy, I think the Lord’s teaching you how to walk alone.’ And not alone like me away from her or us from the Lord, but the two of us having to be dependent upon him.”