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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 631462, member: 11668&quot;]The seller appears to be very confused, but there *is* some tiny grain of truth under all of this....</p><p><br /></p><p>There was an article in one of the hobby magazines a few years back about fancy serial numbers.&nbsp; A dealer who specializes in them pointed out that low serials aren&#039;t nearly as common as they should be.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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!).&nbsp; But a number like 00000001 didn&#039;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.&nbsp; Most of them were vanishing before they ever left the FRB.</p><p><br /></p><p>He did some investigating and found that, sometime in the &#039;70s, the FRBs instituted a policy of destroying the first pack of notes of each block, serials 00000001 to 00000100.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The policy didn&#039;t apply to other kinds of fancy serials because they weren&#039;t selling for nearly as much, at least not back then.&nbsp; A low-number pack still gets out occasionally when the FRB workers aren&#039;t paying attention, but they seem to catch about 90% of them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Separately, the first brick of each new series, serials x00000001A to x00004000A, is generally retained at the Treasury.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; If there are any left, they eventually go into circulation (or recently, sometimes into BEP collector products).&nbsp; But again, this only applies to low serials with suffix A.&nbsp; 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....&nbsp; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>None of that, though, would affect the particular note you found on Ebay.&nbsp; So we just have another example of an Ebay seller who doesn&#039;t quite get it, I&#039;m afraid....[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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