The kid's ten. He probably doesn't understand why counterfeiting is wrong, let alone that it's stealing. I agree that he needs to be taught a lesson, though.
C'mon. By ten you better damn well know what's right and wrong. Nevertheless, at that age one is trying to see how far to push the limit.
I was working on the farm to "make" twenties when I was ten.
I remember when BART (SF Bay Area Transit with mag card readers) users figured out how to game the tickets. You heated a blank ticket and then pressed it with a $20 ticket and as the hot magnetics cooled it gave you two $20 tickets, repeat as often as desired.
It was a cleaver use of magnetization and it forced the BART system to go to a higher temp material that would erase the $20 ticket rather than allow it to be copied...
But we all understood that it was stealing even if the entity being cheated was something as disliked as a mass transit system.