Originally Posted by Numbers  The seller appears to be very confused, but there *is* some tiny grain of truth under all of this....
There was an article in one of the hobby magazines a few years back about fancy serial numbers. A dealer who specializes in them pointed out that low serials aren't nearly as common as they should be. That is, he had contacts who worked in huge bank cash vaults, who had access to millions of new notes fresh from the FRB on a regular basis, and who saved the fancy serials for him. A number like 12345678 would turn up just about as often as it should: once per 96,000,000 notes (which meant that he got several of them per year!). But a number like 00000001 didn't turn up nearly that often; he estimated that there were only about a tenth as many low-number notes reaching the bank vaults as there should have been. Most of them were vanishing before they ever left the FRB.
He did some investigating and found that, sometime in the '70s, the FRBs instituted a policy of destroying the first pack of notes of each block, serials 00000001 to 00000100. Apparently somebody decided it was unseemly to have bank vault workers making personal profits by diverting such packs to dealers, so the FRBs just quit issuing them. The policy didn't apply to other kinds of fancy serials because they weren't selling for nearly as much, at least not back then. A low-number pack still gets out occasionally when the FRB workers aren't paying attention, but they seem to catch about 90% of them.
Separately, the first brick of each new series, serials x00000001A to x00004000A, is generally retained at the Treasury. The first 300 notes are kept on file for some kind of official purposes that nobody would talk about; the rest of the brick is offered to Treasury officials to purchase at face value. If there are any left, they eventually go into circulation (or recently, sometimes into BEP collector products). But again, this only applies to low serials with suffix A. It does appear to be true that the low-serial collector products which have A-suffix notes (almost) always start with 00000301 or higher, while the collector products with star-suffix notes sometimes start at 00000001.... There was a big to-do a few years ago when some very low A-suffix notes did get into one of the collector products unannounced; nobody seems to be sure whether this represents a change in policy or a mistake.
None of that, though, would affect the particular note you found on Ebay. So we just have another example of an Ebay seller who doesn't quite get it, I'm afraid.... |
