the SDSAB cited US Code, Title 18, Section 331, which mentions when mutilating American coins is illegal.
The article pointed out that the critical word is “fraudulently” – which implies that you could pretty much do whatever you want with coins as long as you don’t intend to commit fraud with them (such as pass them off as unchanged coins.
But what about paper currency?
The appropriate Code seems to be Title 18, Section 333:
Note that there’s nothing there about intent to fraud. A literal reading seems to say that if you mess up the bill so badly that they can’t reissue it, you’re in trouble – to the tune of a possible six months in jail. (Which actually doesn’t sound that bad compared to the five years you could get for committing fraud with defaced coins.)
On the other hand, we do see people in movies burning up cash all the time. Maybe that’s all fake money? Or is this a law that’s just rarely enforced?
Having been in retail for 20 years, I’ve seen thousands of dollars that have been defaced in many creative ways: George Washington as Groucho; smoking a doobie; w/arrow through the head, etc. I’ve seen religious phrases and manifestos written along the border. The bank never refused it. The stores where I’ve worked never refused it. As long as someone isn’t trying to pass a $1 as a $10 and I can tell what the bill is, I will take it.
There’s even a website dedicated to the whereabouts of $1.
Oh, if I had ONLY known it a few years ago. One of my aunt’s MANY demented boyfriends tore a twenty dollar bill into as many little pieces to prove to her that he didn’t care about money. I, being a person who unashamedly DOES care about money and doesn’t have nearly enough of it, gathered the little pieces, taped them back together like a jigsaw puzzle, and rushed them to the nearest bank. They not only accepted it, but gave me a shiny new bill in it’s place.
But stores and banks don’t HAVE to accept bills with writing, etc. on it. These bills are (to varying degrees) defaced. If the bill is really bad you might have to send it to the U.S. Treasury for them to identify it as real and they will send you a clean replacement bill. Most banks will accept some pretty bad bills just as a service to their customers, though. The bank I work for deals with some local police departments and courts and we sometimes get money covered in blood or some unidentifiable substances (they put them in sealed evidence bags and clearly identify the bags as hazardous, which we then forward to the Treasury for them for exchange).
But most stores now deface bills, from 20’s (sometimes 10’s) and higher denominations, by drawing a line on it with that really magic marker that detects counterfiets. So by checking to see if a bill is real - that is legal - they deface it, making it not legal? Altho’ the Code does say “with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit …” so I guess checking like this wouldn’t be with bad intent. Unless they scribbled all over it …