Do the Feds record the numbers of the bills they destroy?

Factual Questions
1

Idle curiosity, do not need an answer fast.

I know the Fed bank (or some other unit) destroys worn out or damaged bills. Either by shredding or burning, or maybe both in sequence. What I’m wondering is if they keep track of which bills by serial number they destroy?

Situation: I am a brilliant inventor who is poor, not too greedy, and not very law abiding. I build something akin to the Star Trek replicators, and because I am stupid, decide the best way to take advantage of this is to start counterfeiting.

I get a bundle of 50 one dollar bills (said I was stupid), ordinary pre-circulated bills, not a bunch in serial number order, and put it into the replicator. I push a button, and now I have two identical bundles of one dollar bills. (The copies are absolutely identical, atom by atom, to the input ones, as in, no test of them would reveal they are counterfeit.)

I take the newly created bundle and use it pay for trivial purchases here and there. (Dollar menus here I come!) Say I use the bundle up by the end of September.

So I go back, push the button again, and now I have a new bundle I use in the same way during October. Repeat for November, December, and so forth.

Is there any realistic way that anyone would discover that this counterfeiting was happening? Yes, there would be a slowly increasing number of bills with a serial number that exists twice, thrice, uh fice? whatever times, but what are the odds that one person would ever be in possession of two of the matching bills, and if he did, that he would ever notice the identical numbers? Pretty close to zero, I think.

I was thinking the only flaw in my plan might be if the Feds do track the serial numbers of destroyed bills. Then they will eventually get a second of one of the bills with a particular number turned in, and somebody’s attention would be triggered.

What do you think? Should I proceed with building my replicator?

2

I would think they keep track of how many they get that are in bad shape and need to be shredded

3

The amount, sure, they need to keep their books balanced, be sure someone isn’t helping themselves to grubby old money and so forth. But do they bother to record that bill #A12345678R was destroyed? And then check every new bill submitted for destruction vs the already destroyed ones? Or, for that matter, to make sure that #A12345678R is actually a bill that was produced and put into circulation by them?

It seems like it would be A) a perfect way to detect if counterfeiting was going on and B) a horrendous task with little real payoff to actually do.

4

I was quite curious about your question but was unable to find a whole lot of definitive sources either way. It’s not clear to me that it would be a horrendous task if it could be mostly automated. I think automatic reading of serial numbers, etc. is a pretty solved problem these days. Of course bills to be destroyed are more likely to be damaged in a way that makes that hard.

It’s also plausible to me that regular banks could track their incoming batch banknote serial numbers. It’s also plausible to me that this could flag counterfeiting fairly frequently: I’d imagine if large numbers of duplicate serial numbers are in circulation in a specific city the chances of them being deposited at the same bank by business owners is pretty good. Unclear if anyone actually does this tracking, and the internet has failed me. It’s an interesting question.

This message board is pretty good at having at least a couple of folks tied to an industry online, so maybe you’ll get your answer!

5

Now that we have pretty good OCR and mechanized scanners, I expect that this could be easily automated for bills in any but the worst condition.

I also semi-suspect that the exact processes involved in detecting and tracking counterfeiters is not publicly available knowledge.

It wouldn’t surprise me if most banks didn’t have a pretty good database of the serial numbers in their current possession, but for catching bank robbers, not for foiling counterfeiters.

6

Yes, they record them, just in case they arent really destroyed or in case bad money like DB Coopers.

7

I’m pretty sure I have seen somewhere that they do record the numbers but cannot find a cite. Modern OCR would make it easy to detect counterfeits if they do know what bills should not be in circulation. I don’t know if they are planning to reuse serial numbers, but bills are pulled out of circulation much faster now, and the time would come sooner when they would have to add another digit or letter if they want to do that.

8

When arguments were going about DB Cooper, I was told by a fellow Treasury worker, who had worked at the Mint, that the Numbers were all recorded, thus, even tho DB may have survived, he never spent any significant % of that $. None of those bills turned up at the Mint.

Some were later found in a river.

9

Plenty of room on bills to add more characters, although they can also change numbers to letters and get tons more namespace without adding length.

10

Of course they can. They use letter prefixes and added a digit just to increase the range already. But they didn’t add 2 or 3 more digits when they made the change either. They also use a star for some cases and maybe in the future Idiocracy they’ll use emoticons too. i think they could easily re-use numbers if they wanted to without any changes but I’m not trying to say they would do that. F’rinstance, It may be advantageous in counterfeit detection to never reuse large ranges or patterns of numbers.

11

at the Denver mint workers cannot take coins out of the building. They have buckets at the doors and the money goes to charity.