Yesterday I made the disturbing discovery that one of my dimes has the Nazi symbol – an eagle atop a swastika – stamped/carved onto its face. I took a picture of it last night.
It’s a horrible thing to do, no matter the reason, but I hope that whoever did it just wanted to get a reaction; to spark debate/conversation. I hope they didn’t actually want to promote neo-Naziism. Then again, I suppose that their motive doesn’t really matter.
Whoa, freaky. Right on top of FDR’s face, even.
Maybe those numismatic commercials are expanding into uncharted territory.
They may not have. English punk rockers in the 1970s wore swastikas, not to indicate support for the Nazis, but to suggest that the Allied victory in WWII had simply led to fascism by a different route (i.e. Thatcher’s UK).
Ok, but this is a 2003 dime and it’s not just a swastika. Did the English punk rockers adopt the entire Nazi symbol, including the eagle?
Well, no. 
But I was illustrating that there are other reasons someone might put a swastika on something, not necessarily blaming the Sex Pistols for your dime. 
I thought that was Truman on the dime. Oh well.
It took me a while to make out the eagle. Looks like the perpetrator used a stamp or die to make it. This could be some high school kids idea of a shop-class joke. Or somewhere there may be a nazi schmuck stamping out a load of vandalized currency.
At least it’s not another dollar bill stamped with the words, “Tobacco paid you.” I hate those.
Reasons like just wanting to get a reaction; to spark debate/conversation? 
I was kind of messing with you, because you seemingly only picked up on the “neo-Naziism” part of my post. I meant for the question about the punk rockers using the eagle to be sarcastic, but on looking back I can see that it didn’t come out that way. Oh well. 
Nope, it’s FDR.
Yeah, at first all I noticed was the swastika. But when I picked up the dime to look at it more closely, I noticed the feathers on the right.
It looks more like a dove than an eagle to me.
Except that Thatcher wasn’t PM for another few years but I get your point.
What the hell is “Tobacco paid you” supposed to mean?
You should report this. Defacing the currency in this manner is a federal offense, and this particular defacement is particularly odious. Somewhere out there is a smartass neo-Nazi who’s being cheated out of his prison term.
Anybody know which agency handles this kind of investigation? I know the Secret Service handles counterfeiting, but this isn’t counterfeiting per se…
If you find a bunch more, maybe you could afford one of these :dubious:
Say what you will about FDR, the man could wear an earring.
But they’d probably take the dime away from me. 
I never would have noticed something like this in my change.
You have a good camera–great macro shot.
Huh. Nazi dimes. I got nothin’.
I don’t know that this is a federal offense. 18 U.S.C. 331 makes fraudulently mutilating or altering a coin a federal crime, but stamping a Nazi swastika on the dime (however odious) doesn’t strike me as an attempt to pass a dime off as a quarter or anything like that.
(Of course, the notion of fraudulently altering coins is kind of quaint these days, but back when money was based on a specific weight of metal (gold or silver) a scam artist could clip off a bit of metal on the edge of the coin, pass off the shrunken remainder for full value, and collect the shavings as well–hence the now-obsolete reeded edges on quarters and dimes. Paper money is still subject to things sort of like that; a very crude counterfeiting technique is to glue the corner of a $20 bill onto a $1 and pass it off, while also spending the missing-corner twenty, thus illegally gaining $19; and a more sophisticated technique involves bleaching low-value bills and reprinting them as counterfeit high-value bills, so as to get the paper right. The Japanese have also had some problems with people passing off South Korean 500 won coins as 500 yen coins.)
And how would any agency investigate this?
I once got a dollar bill that had a green dialog-balloon coming out of Washington’s mouth stamped over it, in which it said, “I GREW HEMP!”
In north Carolina, I used to get money with that stamped on it on occassion. It’s put there by fans of the tobacco industry who like to point out how much revenue smoking puts in the state coffers and supossedly into the residents pockets. It may be true, but I hate being reminded that our local economy is supported by cancer. Whenever I got the chance, I’d cross out “paid” and put in “kills.” Just to subvert the pro-tobacco proselytizing.