Haven't seen this one before. The seller appears to have figured out that people like rollover straps where the last two notes have been replaced by scarce sheet-replacement stars...so he's taking ordinary straps of currency, and swapping out the last two notes with common stars! http://www.ebay.com/itm/BUNDLE-2013...639973?hash=item25c149f6e5:g:UyUAAOSwbYZXfE3R http://www.ebay.com/itm/100-PACK-20...448106?hash=item25c0dc39aa:g:sW8AAOSwZVlXnQAG You can tell the BEP didn't put the stars in these straps, because (a) the stars aren't from sheet-replacement runs, and (b) the plate positions of the stars don't match the rest of the strap. What will Ebay sellers think of next...?
The serial numbers of the packs are not consistent with the numbers where sheets would have replaced the last two notes. Should be ####9999 and ###00000.
I am a coun person so I know less about this stuff. I work at a bank and when we get in fed sealed bricks of uncirculated bills, I look at the serial number run on the packs to see if there are any good ones to pull. The other day I saw a pack that was going to end in 0000 so I opened it and checked, and the last 2 bills were star notes way out of sequence. Is this the same thing the eBay seller was trying to replicate? Please educate me so I can keep a watch out myself. Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk
Yes. The BEP uses stars in two different ways: When they catch a defective note *before* the sheets have been cut, they replace the whole sheet by a sheet of stars. When they catch a defective note *after* the notes have been cut and strapped, they replace the whole strap by a strap of stars. In practice, they use a lot more stars in strap form than in sheet form. So the stars that come out in full straps tend to be common (printed in full runs), while the stars that are used in sheets, and come out scattered in straps of regular notes, tend to be much scarcer (printed in short partial runs). When you also take into account the fact that the full-strap stars are easier for cash handlers like yourself to spot (since you don't have to hunt through regular notes to find them), the result is that stars from full straps are a *lot* more common in the collector market than stars from sheets, that get inserted into regular straps. So when you find stars inserted in a regular strap, they're generally scarcer stars, from a short run. When you find an entire strap of stars, they're generally common stars, from a full run. I'm not sure whether the Ebay seller even knows all of that. He may just have noticed that straps with stars mixed in are popular, and decided to make up some of his own, not realizing the difference between common (strap-replacement) stars and scarcer (sheet-replacement) stars.
First clue is of course the serial number "disconnect"; but the most telling is the vocabulary/grammar of the seller: Seller says: "SN may be different do to sale & unavailability " Now what the heck does the verb do mean?? Perhaps it's due to the unavailability of English vocabulary/grammar in the education process. Hmmmm???
