Re this story - A 7-year-old boy from South Carolina found a bag stuffed with cash stolen from a bank.
Let’s say it was found by a less scrupulous person who throws the found cash into their car, drives many states away and tries to spend it bit by bit. Is it inherently illegal to try and pass dyed cash? Do you have to explain where you got the money if the police come asking? Can they take it even if they can’t tie it to a specific robbery.
I heard that story, too, and thought that the stained money would be worthless. Making the money recognizable as stolen is kind of the whole point of the dye. That being said, I suppose spendability would depend on how much dye was on the bill, and how educated/a crap giving the person being offered the bill is.
Only tangentially related, but a certain establishment in PDX was staining their $2 bills red, and were asked to stop defacing money. And some local banks were told not to honor them.
Note: The dye used in dye packs is not considered a contaminant. Notes stained from the dye alone should be deposited normally.
The trick is to pass the bills. Not sure, does it just dye, or is it a paint that obscures what’s behind it? If Joe’s Corner Gas will take the bill then good for you. It’s still legal tender. However, Joe makes a deposit and the bank recognizes it as proceeds of a robbery. Joe gets to play 20 Questions with the cops, and hopefully has a security camera near his till.
SO if you try to spend $20, one bill at a time or a whole wad, the cops will eventually get a pretty good description of you. Even if you found $20,000 just lying by the side of the road, you still can’t just hel yourself to it - red or not.
Your link is from the Federal Reserve and refers to making deposits at a Federal Reserve Bank. The instructions are for how to deposit contaminated money at the Fed. They are saying red dyed money can be deposited normally to** them** without special handling as contaminated.
I don’t think John Doe would be able to walk into the First Bank of Anytown with red stained cash and make a deposit without lots and lots of questions.
And I would expect that red dyed cash is destroyed and replaced with new by the Fed.
I’ve occasionally received bills that had a touch of red around an edge, and just gone ahead and spent them without incident. Of course, it could be a stain from a less dramatic source.
But if Joe’s Corner Gas deposited their daily proceeds including a red-dyed bill, would his bank accept it or refuse it? My guess would be that it would be accepted, but yes there would be questions.
I used to see plenty of (Canadian) bills with everything from rubber stamps and signatures to defacement. Assuming the bill underneath is still recognizable as legal tender, I don’t see why a red dye would stop it from being legal. I have never heard of anyone saying to their cashiers “don’t accept such bills”.
Wouldn’t it follow the same principle as any other stolen good : being seized and returned to the legitimate owner, and a net loss for whoever happened to end up with the dyed bill? I’m not sure there’s or there should be any difference. Typically, stolen money can’t be identified, but since the dye serves this purpose, I’m not sure it’s very different from bringing, say, a stolen ring to a pawnbroker.
How does the dye serve this purpose? I see people write, stamp, paint, draw and scratch all sorts of things onto our currency. It’s never been a problem. I doubt some red splats on your $20-bill will even cause a cashier to blink. If the thing is soaked in paint from tip to toe, that might be more of a problem, but even then, I doubt it. I’m 35 and I’ve only heard (from a friend of a friend, at that) about a cashier not accepting money once because she thought it was counterfeit. I’ve never heard of anyone turning down money because it had a splotch of paint or dye on it. I’ve even seen cashiers use the pointless counterfeit-identifying pens, have it come up “counterfeit”, and just shrug their shoulders and put it in the till.
IIRC from working in a bank, the bills were real but they weren’t updated in awhile so they were the old series. Would’ve been about 11 or more years old at the time.
Watching the video in the OP, it was like being dipped in cherry Kool-Aid – very definitely red but you could still easily identify it as currency and what kind.
Also, granted it was only a small sampling of the bills, but only one looks truly “dipped”, most were just partially or lightly stained. You could probably pass those without too much trouble. If anyone asked, you’d just say “I dunno, I got it in change earlier” or “It came from the ATM like that”.
So, I had always thought that the exploding dye pack was to mark the robber so that they were more easily identifiable shortly after the crime was committed. Mainly as evidence.
Now, I do believe there are dyes that are designed to render the bills non-usable as they are blacked out. The risk in that is great though and then you would have destroyed the bills in that manner without any recovery possible. Factor in risk of the errant teller or bank worker and it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
Yes. It’s fairly clear from the start that these guidelines are not relevant to whether dyed money is legal tender:
One solution would be to launder the money via a paint-balling activity centre - they’d have the ‘dyed-red’ excuses ready-made I imagine.
Nah, they wouldn’t even notice. At my bank, where I take my business deposit, they don’t even physically look at the bills unless there’s an issue. Every single bill I hand them, whether my deposit contains thousands and thousand of bills or is, literally, a single bill, goes through the bill counter. The amount on the bill counter should match my deposit slip, if it does they initial that and hit a button to push the number into their computer. From there they grab the stack and put it in a drawer to be sorted later when they have a few minutes.
The bill counter has a second slot (the middle one). That one catches bills that are potentially fake. Unless red dye puts them in that tray, they’re not going to notice them.
Now, we use two banks. At my other bank (which has multiple branches), they typically hand count bills. Oddly, this is a huge bank with branches all over the country. I’ve always said if I had a fake bill, this is where I’d take it to get rid of it since they don’t use a bill counter (my normal bank catches fake bills a few times a year). Since they hand count bills, a little red dye on a bill probably wouldn’t throw off any alarm bells. I don’t know what the red dye actually looks like, but I’ve seen plenty of money with red splotches on it and no teller at any bank I’ve used has ever batted an eye.
Having said all that, if I were to bring in a deposit that was significantly larger than a normal deposit, or do it several days in a row, containing lots of dyed bills, that may make them suspicious. But IIRC, they also are supposed to report any activity out of the norm like that.