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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 424212, member: 11668&quot;]The person posting on the other site appears not to know what he&#039;s talking about; he also says that a bill with all four corners torn off is no longer legal tender, for example.&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie11" alt=":rolleyes:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>That said, there are several different concepts here that we have to be careful not to confuse....</p><p><br /></p><p>One is when a bill <b><i>still has value</i></b>: as long as over 50% of the bill is present, the Treasury will gladly redeem it at full face value.&nbsp; It doesn&#039;t matter *which* 50% you&#039;ve got; it doesn&#039;t have to have any serial numbers at all, for example, though rumors to the contrary are rather persistent.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another is when a bill is in good enough shape <b><i>to be reissued</i></b> by the Fed: here&#039;s where you have to worry about missing corners, and just how big those missing corners are, and whether there&#039;s tape, and whether there&#039;s writing, and where the writing is, and what color, and....&nbsp; These details will determine whether the Fed&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yet another is what constitutes <b><i>illegal defacement</i></b>, under the law that Gatzdon so helpfully quoted for us.&nbsp; And as others have already pointed out, this threshhold is quite vague, mostly because there&#039;s virtually no relevant case law.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 (&quot;Santa dollars&quot; and the like) agreed to switch to stickers that were easily removable, which the Treasury found acceptable.&nbsp; On a related note, the webmaster of Where&#039;s George has actually had a visit from the Secret Service; they didn&#039;t object to the stamping of bills per se, but had some concerns about whether the Where&#039;s George stamp constituted an illegal advertisement on currency.&nbsp; (The resolution was that Where&#039;s George no longer sells such stamps, but users are free to procure them elsewhere; apparently they&#039;re not advertisements if the stamps aren&#039;t coming from the people running the site being promoted? <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie5" alt=":confused:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />)</p><p><br /></p><p>We might even add a fourth point to the list: when a bill is sufficiently intact that your <b><i>bank will believe</i></b> they can take it.&nbsp; This is where all sorts of strange standards seem to emerge; I&#039;ve had bank tellers say that they&#039;re not allowed to accept bills with obscured serial numbers, or with &quot;large&quot; missing pieces, or with lots of writing on them.&nbsp; But none of these policies are official rules about what bills are still valid currency; they&#039;re the bank&#039;s own decisions that seem intended to make sure the bank doesn&#039;t end up stuck with a counterfeit because a teller accepted a funny-looking bill.&nbsp; The bank can set such rule if it likes (just as *you* have a perfect right to refuse a bill if you&#039;re not confident it&#039;s genuine), but the Treasury is the final arbiter of what is and is not genuine, valid U.S. currency.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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