The forging statement seems rather silly.
$20 -> $200 is still a pretty good mark up, plus in cheques or similar paper based money transfers it's normal to have the amount written out in words as well as in numerals.
You can't easily change $20.00 to $200.00. You could try changing it to $20.000.00, but that would probably overflow whatever box it's written in, since the amount is usually right-justified to begin with.
The decimal point protects the right edge of the amount, while the dollar sign protects the left edge.
Similarly, when people write out a number in English on a check, they often write "Twenty dollars only", not just "Twenty dollars", in order to prevent other words from being added to the end, e.g. "Twenty dollars and a hundred". (There's a nursery rhyme that goes "four and twenty blackbirds", so writing the smaller number first is clearly not unheard of.)
For anything under 100, in German and Dutch the least significant number goes first: one and thirty, eight and ninety. 100 and above goes before that, so 121 is 'one hundred one and twenty'. The nursery rhyme might be inspired by that, or maybe there was something similar in English back in the day, but either way - I'd say it's highly unusual to put those numbers in that order in English.
This is getting tangential, but the French way of counting seems to be even more strange with certain numbers. 93 is "quatre-vingt-treize", i.e. "four-twenties-and-thirteen".
(Except in Belgium and Switzerland and this-one-valley-in-Italy et cetera, where it is just "nonante-trois".)
Compared to that, "drei-und-neunzig" is still not bad.
Apparently it was common in the south as well. Some writer who was fined in the 19th Century then lampooned the magistrate as "Monsieur Nonante-Cinque", the fine having been 95 francs.
