On July the 3rd of 1936, the Director of the Bank of Algeria and Tunisia issued a report on new measures to protect the colonial currency. He warned that currency trafficking networks in the Tunisian protectorate were “growing even beyond the borders of the colony” because natives “lacked an economic education” and couldn’t decipher between real and fake currency. This paper looks at this archive among other official reports circulating between French authorities in the Tunisian protectorate focusing specifically on reports from the 1930s when new sets of coins and banknotes were issued. I interrogate the issue of counterfeit money and fake currencies during the French colonial period in the Tunisian Protectorate. Counterfeit money has across times been considered a threat to authority and is labeled as an offense across regimes and periods. However, in the context of the Tunisian protectorate, reports that mention counterfeit money can help us decipher the anxieties of rule and the limits to colonial power. Instead of viewing criminality and fraud as a given category, this paper considers how crimes are productive historical threads to follow and that can help us analyze the limits of rule and control. To that extent, this paper asks: Why did counterfeit money become a site of anxiety for French authorities? How do reports on currency and counterfeit money enlighten on the nature of colonial power as « anxious power »? By reading “along the grain” (Stoler 2009), this paper analyzes how French officials described fake currency as the material symptom of subterranean networks that were threatening the colony. These counterfeit coins, rumored to circulate provoked a set of anxieties over the power to govern. In contrast, other reports of that era, detail the making of official currency forms and emphasize material uniqueness as a sign of authority. By putting reports on counterfeit and those on official currency in conversation, this paper examines how attempts to materialize money into currency produce the “possibility of the simulacrum” (Derrida 1992, 46) and brings together the relation between material alterations and moral claims over what's “real”. In doing so, I read French archives on money as an assemblage of different documents where the anxiety of fraud, and by extension of colonial authority, always seem present. Ultimately this paper argues that the struggles over the material form of money, as unique or reproducible, fake or real unravels anxieties of power in a colonial setting.