I always wondered how blind people know what denomination of bills they are holding in their hand…
I believe there are bill reader devices.
–Tim
a pal of mine in college was blind and he was very careful about the placement in his wallet (so he know for example, the first one is a twenty, second a five, then three ones for example).
as for how he knew in the first place, in some cases, a trusted person (spouse, friend etc). and I think I’ve seen somewhere a currency reader machine (hand held) that can read the bills (after all bill changers can tell the difference between a one and a five). so the technology exists.
I won’t pretend to know all of the details; but you have keyed in on a fairly common scam. People who are, or pretend to be, blind; claim to have handed over a larger denomination bill than is actually the case. They depend upon a combination of uncertainty and embarrassment to get them through. In my case, I was lucky enough to have NO bills even as large as even a twenty. Despite this fact, it really didn’t even occur to me or my employer to report the incident until sometime later when we had learned of other victims.
Just as an aside; I realize that this MUST BE a bigger problem for people who are actually blind than for poor schmucks like me. Like the OP, I am curious as to how one protects oneself from such charges…
Am I right in thinking that the U.S. bill are the same size? In the U.K., money notes of different denominations are of different sizes, but then even that only works if you have a couple to compare to each other, I suppose. But perhaps one could memorise the sizes, compared to one’s fingers or something.
Blind people, in the US, have to be very careful to remember what bills they place in their wallets (IIRC they fold each denomination differently, so they can tell by touch…).
Here in Korea, there are three bills, 1000 won, 5000 won, and 10,000 won (there is no bill larger than a 10,000) each bill has a series of dots in the lower left corner to tell blind people which bill it is (1 dot for 1000, 2 dots for 5000, 3 dots for 10,000)… so a blind perosn can easily tell, by touch, which bill he/she has!
A sighted person, however, may not be able to tell… as the dots are relatively hard to feel with the fingertips…
Anyone else find that a nation which requires Braille on drive-up ATMs doesn’t make the effort to put Braille or some other tactile cue on its money a little odd?
Sua
I once asked a blind friend about this. She only kept $5 and $1 bills, so it was simple to keep them separate.
The reason there were no larger bills was to ensure you’re getting the right change. If you hand a $10 for a $3 sale, they could give you three ones and tell you it was a five and two ones. If you stick with fives, they will give you back the correct number of bills, and the bills will be right denomination (unless they’re feeling charitable). You just use two fives for sales about $10.
My friend who is blind does the “folding the bills differently” thing. She says that people really don’t try to trick her–that most are really honest. And this is in NYC.
This goes for Dutch money as well, and I believe the Euro bills are going to have a similar system. I can’t remember a time when the bills weren’t equiped with those dots. I guess they must have been there for at least 20 years now.
I used to have a blind neighbor, and I sometimes ran errands for him. Initially, someone who they trust has to tell them what denomination the bill is. For my neighbor, he put 1’s into his wallet normally, 5’s were folded in half, 10’s were folded in thirds, 20’s were folded in half lengthwise. Never saw him handle anything larger than a twenty.
The cafeteria where I work (because I work for the State of Texas) is owned and operated by blind people (except for the deep fryer). The blind cashiers rely on customers to tell them the denomination of every bill, and they keep them in seperate drawers. They also have a little machine they can run a bill through that will say the denomination.
Astroboy14 wrote:
Sounds like it would be awfully easy, for someone who wanted to scam a blind person, to “counterfeit” a 10,000 Won bill out of a 1000 Won bill by embossing a couple of extra dots in the corner. And the authorities would be hard-pressed to prove that a bill with an extra bump on it was a deliberate act of counterfeiting and not a bill that had been lying against a stick wrong.
Sounds like a possibility, Tracer. Then again, it would be even easier with US money, right?
I’ve never heard of anyone doing such a thing deliberately, so I don’t think misuse of the “braille” system on bills is a widespread problem.
While doing some archives work I came across some letters written to the Dept. of the Treasury asking why American money wasn’t marked with Braille dots for the benefit of the blind. The response was that (1) the dots would quickly be worn down, and (2) their surveys of the blind community indicated that the blind did not have enough of a problem distinguishing the bills to warrant a whole new system being implemented. FWIW.
It might be easy to conterfeit a bill this way, but you’d have to have a population of blind people to rip off with it…
For what it’s worth, many years ago I had a job at a hotel, one day the cashier from the hotel’s restaurant came in with a bill that someone had given her as payment for a meal. The culprit had cut the corner off a couple of $20 bills (with the number 20 on them) and taped the corners onto a one dollar bill! The cashier didn’t look at it closely, and got ripped off for the price of the meal, and the change she gave the guy! Minus the $1 she got, of course… 
German money (now in it’s last year of existence, of course) also has the braille dots, and are all different sizes. I would guess that the latter is probably more helpful to people, since the dots do wear down after a while (or am I just not able to feel the difference?) Also the notes are different colors, which might help people with some difficulty seeing.
The U.S. money, while it certainly has a classic appearance, is unfortunately extremely impractical.
Swedish money doesn’t have braille dots, but the upper corner denomination is embossed so it’s fairly easy to tell. The size of the bills also differ; higher value, larger bill.
I’ve witnessed this in stores in Enwye, also. Perhaps there’s a bit more humanity to humanity than most of humanity allows for
Cartooniverse
Like Korea, Japan also uses a braille-type system. The bills (1000, 5000 and 10000 yen) have ring-shaped indentations in a different pattern for each denomination.
And Suasponte, in a cruel twist, most ATMs in Japan don’t use braille.
–sublight.