Mutilated Money? This Place Will Give You a Fresh Stack

(curious music) - If you have money that's been damaged in a fire, in a flood, that's been eaten by insects or animals, we'll evaluate and determine how much is there and reimburse you for it. (curious music) My name is Eric Walsh, I'm the assistant manager at the Mutilated Currency Division. Every year, the Mutilated Currency Division receives about 23,000 cases, people will send money that's been somehow damaged, and we reimburse, annually, about 40 million dollars. It's a free service the government provides that we pay dollar in dollar out. We require 51 percent of the note present to pay on it and that just protects us from paying twice on the same note. Once we determine the amount, we will send a treasury check for what we discover. We're pretty low-tech here, so the tools of the trade are scissors, knives, scalpels, glue and tape, and maybe a pair of tweezers. The most challenging cases are usually cases that the money has gotten wet and sat for long periods of times, and it'll actually petrify and be solid as a brick. A lot of it is "the dog ate my money." We get hundreds of those cases a year. A lot of people will hide their money in the oven and forget about it, or they'll get it wet and put it in the microwave and that will ignite the currency. Our most infamous case took place in the '80s, and what happened was a farmer lost his wallet in a field and discovered that his cow had eaten it, and we always encourage the submitter to send in the package as it is; and the farmer sent in the cow's stomach, which we were able to retrieve the wallet from and reimburse the farmer his currency. Our office consists of just under 20 people, and we have 12 people that examine and process the submissions, and they do roughly between 1,000 and 2,000 claims each year. We do get an increased amount of cases after a natural disaster. Over the past year between the hurricanes and wildfires out in California, we've reimbursed over two million dollars. We're called upon when a lot of people hit their low point, so any relief that you could provide someone after they lost all their money in a flood or after their house burned down is very rewarding. Hopefully we're a service that you will never need to use, but in case something does happen, we're here for you. (electronic chime)

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 12,256,460

Rating: 4.9398141 out of 5

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, Resuscitating money, money, bucks, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Weird & Fun Knowledge, Cash, Government, Washington, Washtington D.C., D.C., Fixing, Cool, Wow, Did you know, surprising, dollars, dollar bills, dollar bill, cash flow, Biography & Profile, Lifestyle & Entertainment, bizarre, Bank, US Gov, Mutilated, Mutilated Money, damaged, bills, broken

Id: trZmMCsgxUw

Length: 2min 37sec (157 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/wwphd]

Have a feeling theres a ton more metrics / tools being used that they don't share here to prevent people defrauding the system. Cool inside look though!

[u/FinTheHumann]

How much was in the wallet though? Was it so much that the farmer just had to tear open the cow immediately to get to the stomach and retrieve his wad of hundreds?

[u/[deleted]]

You have to have at least 51% of the bill still intact in order to exchange.

[u/BlueChamp10]

what's the catch?

[u/boxofschrodinger]

If the wallet the cow had eaten was made out of leather, does that make him a cannibal?

[u/Shakill_The_GOD]

More than 51% of bill is needed I know Chase does this, used to work there. Some of the bills that customers exchanged were horrible enough I had to wear latex gloves to handle them and ship them out.

[u/Abnormal_Armadillo]

Would probably save a lot more money in the long run if it was made out of hardier materials and could be kept in circulation longer.

[u/finlaygills]

Is there any other checks they do or can anyone send stuff in? Because this seems like a really good way to launder money.

[u/meehaja]

I used to work for a bank and one of my jobs was to “process” money that had been recovered by the police into “notes to be destroyed” and notes to return to circulation. Mostly it was blood, burnt notes and notes where a dye pack had gone off. I also learnt that you could cut ten bank notes into tenths, and have enough bits to make eleven acceptable notes.