The Logistics Of Tracing Particular Banknotes

[Krepostnoi]

A vague thought arising from the D B Cooper thread - the claim is that none of Cooper's banknote haul has ever been spent. Well, how do they know? Sure, they recorded the serial numbers of the notes, but what good would that actually do them? Assuming the ransom was paid in $100 bills, that's 2000 of the things. Surely a bank clerk would have to be very bored indeed to check off any bills manually against a list circulated by the FBI, just on the off-chance. I assume Cooper stipulated non-consecutive numbers (although, again, did he take the time to check?)

Now, for the benefit of the agents watching me through my webcam, let me state for the record that I have no plans to parachute out the back of an airliner any time soon, so this is just idle speculation. But just how would the Feds, or whichever relevant official agency, go about trying to trace the subsequent movements of particular banknotes?

As a post-scriptum, I remember reading that there are more dollars in circulation outwith the USA than within. For better or worse, the dollar is the world's unofficial back-up currency of choice. So those notes could well be swirling around the black economy of a smaller South American state for example, could they not?

 

[Min Bannister]

Interesting question. I remember getting pictures of dodgy bank notes stuck up back when I worked in a Post Office but I can't remember if we ever got serial numbers. I would imagine that there does just come a point where notes are checked. They would need some way to work out how many notes go missing and how many are fake and so on. Perhaps when they are recalled to the bank? Nowadays I expect it is done by machine but back then some poor sod probably had to look through them.

 

[James_H]

Someone on reddit had the same question: it seems that the answer is it's hard to check unless they've come directly from the bank, i.e. mint notes being used to pay a ransom. Though one poster says that machines in modern banks do automatically scan and store serial numbers of the bills they process.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ou4h4

You might get a kick out of this website - track a dollar bill by its serial number: https://www.wheresgeorge.com/

 

[EnolaGaia]

A vague thought arising from the D B Cooper thread - the claim is that none of Cooper's banknote haul has ever been spent. Well, how do they know? Sure, they recorded the serial numbers of the notes, but what good would that actually do them? Assuming the ransom was paid in $100 bills, that's 2000 of the things. Surely a bank clerk would have to be very bored indeed to check off any bills manually against a list circulated by the FBI, just on the off-chance. I assume Cooper stipulated non-consecutive numbers (although, again, did he take the time to check?)

The ransom was paid in $20 bills with non-consecutive serial numbers.

The FBI distributed the list of 10,000 serial numbers to banks, casinos, etc., mainly in the American west and Pacific northwest.

There wasn't any technological capability at the time that would have supported automatic scanning at these sorts of places.

As far as I know, banks and other private / commercial institutions either ignored the FBI's request to watch for Cooper currency or quit bothering with it after a short while.

I presume the relevant federal institutions (Federal Reserve; Printing Office) kept an eye out for Cooper currency, but I doubt they maintained the searching for more than a year or two.

 

[tuco]

It looks like its now safe to spend ( D B ) Krepostnoi.

 

[Krepostnoi]

It looks like its now safe to spend ( D B ) Krepostnoi.

Damn, rumbled. Mind you, I've been hiding in plane sight: Krepostnoi is an anagram of Isnt Kooper.

 

[Ermintruder]

Nowadays I expect it is done by machine

There wasn't any technological capability at the time that would have supported automatic scanning at these sorts of places

Does this technology actually exist, now or in the past? It makes sense: but...

I had presumed that in a mechanism similar to the way in which checks/cheques are number-scanned along their edges within banks, that was what also happened with banknotes. However, in a conversation with a bank teller a few years back, I was advised that this did not happen.

Certainly cheques/checks have those odd 1960s-style machine-readable curious blocky numbers beloved of retro scifi, whereas banknotes have overprinted typographic standard numbers, so notwithstanding improved character recognition, what did (and does) go on with this?

And a related point: why on earth don't banknotes actually include barcodes? I mean some sneaky propriatory version, not the semi-universal zebra ANSI-5 interleave shop & tech kind, I mean a bespoke optological printed accession number? The technology for THAT is probably over half-a-century old.

One might almost be tempted to postulate a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory as to why that hasn't been put into place (I could fill a page right now with all sorts of wild possible reasons).....the strangest of which might be that banknotes indeed perhaps do possess such a machine-readable unique papyronomic sequential identifier...just invisibly and unreportably?

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

What’s that I vaguely remember about the Yorkshire Ripper murders where Sutcliffe paid one lady with a new bank note which was (or should’ve been) traceable to the payroll of his employer?

 

[Min Bannister]

This is a really interesting thread by the way. It is rather looking as if the initial claim is really just a UL. So often repeated that no-one has ever checked it.

 

[Frideswide]

Though one poster says that machines in modern banks do automatically scan and store serial numbers of the bills they process.

I'm thinking that this technology is post DB Cooper?

 

[escargot]

What’s that I vaguely remember about the Yorkshire Ripper murders where Sutcliffe paid one lady with a new bank note which was (or should’ve been) traceable to the payroll of his employer?

The operation behind the tracing was awesome. Bank of England workers were set to work with bundles of numbered but blank notes which they processed like the real ones to track down where every single note from the batch was sent in the country.

The information was good enough to point straight to Sutcliffe. He was about to be re-visited and arrested on the basis of it when he was picked up by a patrol on the basis of suspicious behaviour, and his weapons were later found hidden nearby.

 

[James_H]

I'm thinking that this technology is post DB Cooper?

I would also think so

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

The operation behind the tracing was awesome. Bank of England workers were set to work with bundles of numbered but blank notes which they processed like the real ones to track down where every single note from the batch was sent in the country.

The information was good enough to point straight to Sutcliffe. He was about to be re-visited and arrested on the basis of it when he was picked up by a patrol on the basis of suspicious behaviour, and his weapons were later found hidden nearby.

Cheers, Scargy! I knew there was something about banknotes and that it was in analogue times... didn’t remember it was close to the eventual capture!

 

[AlchoPwn]

I am somewhat surprised that banknotes haven't adopted barcodes like everything else in the world.

 

[EnolaGaia]

There are such things as machine-readable materials (inks; embedded polymers) that could be used to tag bank notes.

My point is that there's no need to imprint an optically scan-able (and hence visible) bar code on individual bank notes. An embedded / invisible "tag" would be less vulnerable to wear, modification, or faking.

The primary selling point for such note registration is detecting counterfeit notes.

 

[Mythopoeika]

There are such things as machine-readable materials (inks; embedded polymers) that could be used to tag bank notes.

The serial numbers on cheques and banknotes are printed in a machine-readable font that's been around for a long time (since the 60s, I think). They can be read really quickly with the right equipment.