My dad died a couple years ago and had a unfinished state quarter set. It was complete except for the final year 2008 Hawaii, Alaska, Oklahoma, Arizona. I went through some sacks of change and found the ones I needed to complete his collection. He has them mounted on a decorative board. Dad had put together four or five sets of these state quarters. He’d given a couple mounted sets as Christmas presents just before he passed. He used to buy rolls of quarters and go through them for the state quarters.
They’ve been selling on ebay for a buck or two for many years. But I was quite surprised to find them in general circulation. Whoever used one of them for a candy bar was pretty foolish. Since they are worth ten times face value on ebay.
Were they just restamped quarters and legal currency? They’ve apparently been passing through the banks without any issue.
What’s really weird is they aren’t tokens. These have the same weight and feel as a regular quarter. That’s why I wondered if someone restamped some real quarters.
To answer the original question, here’s a link to the issues around those penny-squashing machines: Are penny press machines legal?
To summarize: It’s (probably) not illegal to destroy currency in the creation of something else, so long as it’s not done fraudulently. It is illegal to circulate them as currency afterward. That’s assuming they’ve been restamped.
If they’re created from “whole cloth,” as it were, then of course it’s illegal to circulate them as legal tender.
In neither case does there seem to be a problem with selling them for any amount (greater or less than their “face” value), so long as it’s made clear that they’re not real tender.
Note that melting down pennies and nickels is now illegal. Presumably they would be unhappy with someone re-stamping these coins and then later melting down the “no longer coins”. Which makes one wonder how one could legally dispose of an altered penny or nickel? Can’t spend it. Can’t scrap it. Landfill only?
I have never seen any of these parody quarters before and I find the Arkansas one with Clinton and the woman obstructed by the tree hilarious!
I believe, as long as you don’t try to pass it off as a real quarter, but just as a novelty item, then the government won’t come crashing down on you. I could be wrong, but a quarter costing someone $3.25 will end up in circulation only by accident. And then, the person loses $3.00 in the process. That isn’t a counterfeiter that is going to get rich!
I think there has to be a clear intent to counterfeit. I saw a show where a guy was taking the sack dollars and scraping off the face and leaving basically the edges, and then popping a quarter into the void. It made for a cool looking coin, but it cost much more than the $1.25 the guy had invested in the original coins to make them. He sold them at a fair profit, but that’s ok according to the show because he isn’t attempting to defraud anyone.
What would interest me if I was the government, though, is the manufacturing process. If they are being pressed out by a machine that uses a die, similar to how a real coin is made, then I can see that being a real problem, especially if the homemade quarters are the same size and weight as real quarters.
Not sure how the bank would detect a counterfeit coin, other than by weighing it. But if it matches the weight and size, odds are it would pass through just about everyone’s hands that touches it. A homemade quarter probably won’t have the same metallurgical makeup as a real quarter, but i doubt a bank is able to check easily for something like that.
They probably do, actually. It’d have a different conductivity, which means different magnetic inductance, which is how vending machines tell the difference. If they’ve got devices for that in vending machines, I wouldn’t be surprised if they do in banks, too.
Logic (a poor guide) tells me that anything issued by the US Mint is legal tender as long as it can be recognized. When coins were made of silver, they would wear down after a few decades to almost featureless discs, and continued to circulate as legal tender. Such coins were often received in change in the 1960s. The fact that the Washington obverse is also altered suggests that they are not re-stamped originals – why would anyone bother to alter the obverse side? The test would be in a vending machine.
It is probably illegal to willfully deface or mutilate circulating US currency, but once you are in possession of it, it is still legal tender. For example, if you have a US dollar bill that is torn in half, or partially burned, you can exchange it for a whole one at any bank by presenting the two halves with matching serial numbers.
Banks do not routinely check coins for authenticity, and a roll of quarters from a bank near the Canadian border often has at least one Canadian quarter in there, which will not work in a vending machine.
So, if these are original coins that have been re-stamped, they are legal tender. If they are made from unauthorized blanks, they are not.
You can tell if they’re restamped by what they’re made of. A restamped quarter is going to be made of sandwich metal. Look at the edge of a quarter (or dime) and you’ll see the center part of the coin is a reddish color. That’s pure copper, as opposed to the outer layers which are copper-nickel alloy. This is sandwich metal.
A parody coin made from scratch is unlikely to be made of sandwich metal. Most likely it’ll just be made of plain copper-nickel alloy, which is what just about every other country makes their higher denomination coins with. The US Mint goes through a number of extra steps to make sandwich metal, and it probably makes the coins more expensive to make. Not sure why they do it, other than that they’ve been doing it since 1964 and see no reason to change things.
As a link somewhere upthread pointed out, the legality turns on intent. So long as you don’t have an intent to defraud, you’re probably fine. (This also covers me when I’m feeling sufficiently motivated to cross out “In God We Trust” on banknotes.)
They are not the same size as quarters, they are larger. They are not restamped quarters.
The mint prints a lot of things that are not currency. There is a process to make things currency, which the treasury controls, not the mint. I heard that one coin was not made currency, but some were stolen and got out, the rest were destroyed. Some of the ones that got out were seized when found and also destroyed.
