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If someone pays you in cash, do you really look up the serial numbers of all the bills you receive?
by ericsoderstrom 5y ago
If someone pays you in cash, do you really look up the serial numbers of all the bills you receive?
- dkersten 5y agoAnd keep a list of all serial numbers of stolen money to check against.
- Guest19023892 5y agoNo, but I might deposit that money in the bank, and the bank could check those serial numbers.
- spoonjim 5y agoThis isn't so far fetched. Cash registers already have Internet connections and can be outfitted with cameras to record all bills going in, except maybe those inserted in a stack. And ATMs might already be recording serial numbers of dispensed bills. Essentially they might/could do with currency what they do with license plates, which is track where everything goes and at what times.
- Eduard 5y agoLike 0 cash registers I have ever seen employ this.
- deftnerd 5y agoIt's a feature on some money counters, which seem like something banks might use at the end of the day to check the balances in the drawers.
- anonporridge 5y agoTruth is, most cash these days probably only has one or two transactions between bank withdrawal and bank deposit. If the banks track serial numbers, they could probably build a fairly complete picture of what kind of transactions are going on. With the vast amount of data, you could probably fill in a lot of the gaps.
- alcover 5y agoATMs might already be recording serial numbers I've been wondering about this forever. Say John gets bills from the ATM then pays dealer Dylan for weed. Dylan then buys a beer at a bar. If Dylan gets convicted, and banks collaborate with the police, then John gets subjected to - at least - parallel reconstruction.
- o-__-o 5y agoPlausible deniability wrecks that entire thesis (someone existing between John and Dylan such as a gas station)
- alcover 5y agoGas station isn't someone. It's an endpoint, as the bar in my story. If the gas station cashier takes from the register to get a bier, you're right. If not, my thesis still holds I think.
- miskin 5y agoWhat if I pay with 100 Euro bank note and get back "tainted" 50 Euro note and then pay in bar? Bank notes are not just collected and sent back to bank.
- alcover 5y agoYou're right but the higher the denomination, the smaller the chance it'll serve as change.
- o-__-o 5y agoDoesn’t matter, plausible deniability means a reasonable person might spend it. Without knowing who’s next, you may have circumstantial evidence but that’s not enough to hold up in court. You don’t punish someone based on chance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TrainedMonkey 5y agoNo, but eventually they end up at the bank or similar and tracing process starts. One banknote probably won't tell you much, but if thieves are spending constantly you will find many, and you only need to get lucky once.
- Geeflow 5y agoActually, some people do. There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/ https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is. I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)
- myself248 5y agoI played with Where's George? for a few minutes, then got bored. None of these things seem to have enough adoption to make it interesting. If there were money in it, someone would throw OCR at the problem. Say, attach prizes to certain bills, or finding certain patterns of bills (say, two bills whose serial numbers are mathematically related a certain way).
- ianmcgowan 5y agoIf a government wanted to encourage spending, they could turn the lottery inside out by offering payouts on cash being spent by everyone. You take a picture of your money and if the serial number is today's lucky winner you get $1MM. Though maybe that would encourage hoarding instead? Cobra effect perhaps?
- Someone 5y agoEuro coin tracking was a bit popular in the early days of the euro, as it showed how coins moved around Europe (you can’t identify individual coins, but each country has its own coins that can be used throughout the euro zone. Spanish and Italian coins move to Germany and the Benelux faster in summer than in winter, for example) You can still play that game with new coins, but it’s less f visible now, as most coins are old and those already are well dispersed throughout the euro zone (and, of course, more and more people pay with a card)
- hof 5y agoThe kidnapper of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Jan_Heijn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Jan_Heijn was caught because a teller recognized a bill number that he had spent