An interesting (and sort of related) anecdote: Some decades ago (unfortunately, so long ago that I can't easily find any references to it - it was probably in

An interesting (and sort of related) anecdote: Some decades ago (unfortunately, so long ago that I can't easily find any references to it - it was probably in the 1980s), there was a robbery of a large number of bank notes in my country. For a while after that, all cashiers at markets had a booklet with the serial numbers of the stolen bank notes, so they would be rejected and/or reported to the police. That was possible because the bank notes were newly issued (so they had blocks of consecutive serial numbers), and had never actually entered circulation (IIRC, they were stolen before arriving at the bank). While the situation is not identical, there are some similarities: an innocent person (who did not take care of checking the serial number when receiving a bank note) could have their money rejected when trying to buy at a market (and would probably also be questioned by the police). (I don't recall whether the one(s) who stole the bank notes was/were actually caught; are there other Brazilians here who remember about this case? I think it's not the 2005 robbery, which stole only notes which had already entered circulation.)