2001 $1 high number cut note

Well...you learn something new everyday!

I have found a number of bills with *96*******. I don't keep them because I figure there should be at least 9's to be worth collecting. This knowledge sheds a bit more light on glancing the first two numbers of the bills I get from the bank here now.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

The person posting on the other site appears not to know what he's talking about; he also says that a bill with all four corners torn off is no longer legal tender, for example.

That said, there are several different concepts here that we have to be careful not to confuse....

One is when a bill still has value: as long as over 50% of the bill is present, the Treasury will gladly redeem it at full face value. It doesn't matter *which* 50% you've got; it doesn't have to have any serial numbers at all, for example, though rumors to the contrary are rather persistent.

Another is when a bill is in good enough shape to be reissued by the Fed: here's where you have to worry about missing corners, and just how big those missing corners are, and whether there's tape, and whether there's writing, and where the writing is, and what color, and.... These details will determine whether the Fed's automated processing decides to condemn a note to the shredder; but even a bill which fails these tests by a mile can still be perfectly good currency.

Yet another is what constitutes illegal defacement, under the law that Gatzdon so helpfully quoted for us. And as others have already pointed out, this threshhold is quite vague, mostly because there's virtually no relevant case law. The Treasury has threatened legal action in a few cases when firms were putting stickers on currency as advertising gimmicks or to create novelty items, so in their view, these actions would appear to be illegal. But no court was ever asked to decide the question; all the advertising quickly ended at just the threat of a suit, and the producers of the stickered novelty bills ("Santa dollars" and the like) agreed to switch to stickers that were easily removable, which the Treasury found acceptable. On a related note, the webmaster of Where's George has actually had a visit from the Secret Service; they didn't object to the stamping of bills per se, but had some concerns about whether the Where's George stamp constituted an illegal advertisement on currency. (The resolution was that Where's George no longer sells such stamps, but users are free to procure them elsewhere; apparently they're not advertisements if the stamps aren't coming from the people running the site being promoted? )

We might even add a fourth point to the list: when a bill is sufficiently intact that your bank will believe they can take it. This is where all sorts of strange standards seem to emerge; I've had bank tellers say that they're not allowed to accept bills with obscured serial numbers, or with "large" missing pieces, or with lots of writing on them. But none of these policies are official rules about what bills are still valid currency; they're the bank's own decisions that seem intended to make sure the bank doesn't end up stuck with a counterfeit because a teller accepted a funny-looking bill. The bank can set such rule if it likes (just as *you* have a perfect right to refuse a bill if you're not confident it's genuine), but the Treasury is the final arbiter of what is and is not genuine, valid U.S. currency.

 

good points, as usual, numbers!

Not long ago, i went to a bank to cash in a couple hundred in singles. One of the notes had a red ring around the protrait (it looked to me like someone colored a wheres george stamp to conceal it) ... well, when the teller got to that note, she put it aside and told me whe could accept it. So when she was done with the rest of the notes, and gave me my money, i left the note she wouldnt accept on the counter and walked away. She called back to me and told me i forgot something. I told her that if she told me she couldnt accept it, then it was of no use to me. She asked me what she was supposed to do with it, i told he that if she didnt think it was acceptable, to throw it away. and i left. i am not sure what she did with the dollar, but i didnt care! i was just a little miffed she would take the dollar. if it was a larger note, i would have made the manager come over to verify it and made sure they accepted it. but since it was a buck... well, i was in a little bit of a hurry.

 

That's a funny dilemma you left for her. She cannot put it in her pocket or throw it away as it's not hers and I doubt the bank allows employees to just throw away money so now she probably had to get her boss involved. Serves her right - if there was a question about the money she should have involved her boss while you were there instead of possibly offending a customer. Sucessful companies realize it's all about customer service.

Some good stuff has come up in this thread!