Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler man exchanges 5.2 million muddy decomposed dollars

"The businessman arrived at the Treasury Department carrying a suitcase stuffed with about $5.2 million. The bills were decomposing, nearly unrecognizable, and he asked to swap them for a cashier's check. He said the money came from Mexico..."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/buried_millions

Long but interesting read. I know I'd like to find $20M in my basement, by the alfalfa field, where I pulled a tree up, from inheritance!

yeah... He just can't seem to get his story straight!

mmm I found $20 once

I found $200 on the ground in front of the ATM once. Someone must have been drunk. I was too stupid to keep it. I put it in the night deposit with a note, and of course the next day people told me I should have kept it and called the bank to say that if someone reported that amount of money missing, THEN I could give it up.

I found $100 in a parking lot once.

I wasn't about to go around asking "Did you lose $100?" So we sat in the parking lot for a while to see if someone was wandering around looking for something... nobody ever did so we had to keep it.

When I was 15 I went on a trip for school to Florida. At a restaruant I found some $425-ish dollars and some change on the floor just under one of the tables. As a typical kid, I was like "WOW!" (heck, as an adult, I'd be the same). Anyway, I could see the cashier and just watched both the table where I spotted the money, and the cashier. Sure enough, about 20 minutes later (after my friends and I had spent the money in our minds) this guy comes in with, as I remember it, a British accent. He said to the cahier that he was missing his "pocket change"... I stepped forth and asked him how much he was missing, and he thought that it was about $400, so I gave it all to him... He said thank you, and left. While I didn't expect it, I was kind of hoping for a reward for being honest and giving him his money back, but alas, I just got a thank you.

I'd like to have that kind of "pocket change" everyday.

Today's moral lesson:

Doing the right thing should be reward enough.



As Tom would say, "Reflect!"

Still, if it had been my $425 that had been returned, I'd have felt obligated to give the little bugger a reward.

Nick, if you can find my pocket change, I'll gladly give you 15%!

Sean apparently has me confused with bbigwyrz.

Nick, I'd refuse the 15% of JP's lint, if I were you.

Tom, I'm easily confused. . .

Yeah, I saw this story on CNN. My home was built in 1910 by a doctor, and part of the basement is just dirt. My wife and I joke that we should dig it up and see if he buried any money during the depression.

In college (10 years ago) I worked at a bank as a teller. You'd be amazed at what people bring in. I remember spending one afternoon going through a paper bag filled with burned-up money, trying to salvage as many bills as possible for a customer.

And as far as this guy is concerned, I guarantee that the IRS knows all about him. Any cash amount over $3,000 presented to a bank is reported to the IRS. Amounts over $10,000 get even more paperwork. Which is probably a prime reason why we used to do lots of Money Orders to persons of dubious citizenship for $2,990 cash.

Hey, I was 15 years old. I hadn't learned about morals yet.

Pete: Burnt money? How much of the dollar had to be intact?

I am guessing it is at least 50%

When I worked there, we were told that the official US Treasury rule is that 51% of a bill is still considered legal currency. Of course, how in the world could you tell the difference between 49% and 51%? You can't, exactly. We did once have some guy come in and try to exchange a few precisely cut bills for new ones. He was smart enough to not include two halves with equal serial numbers, but he was obviously trying to turn one bill into two.

So how did we handle it? Serial numbers. In order to exchange a damaged bill for a new one, we had to have all of one serial number and at least one whole digit of the second. Taped up, stapled or paper-clipped back together from shards was fine (I've seen it all...), but we just had to have those serial numbers. That guaranteed that we were replacing one old bill with one new bill.

In the case of the burnt bag of money, you can imagine what it looked like. As I recall, there weren't but a handful of bills that we could salvage. Hard to say how much was supposedly in there, but I'd guess maybe 5% of the value, based on the fragments we found. Most of it was ash or burnt beyond recognition. I never did learn the story behind it, but it was a good example of why it's not a good idea to keep a lot of money lying around.

And all those old bill remnants get sent to the nearest Federal Reserve for destruction.

The *vast* majority of damaged bills were simply ripped at a corner, which was NBD to replace. We'd occasionally get some that had been through a serious wash though. We treated these with some degree of suspicion, because that's a major way that counterfeiters try to pass their bills. I actually caught a couple of counterfeit bills while I worked there. Always fun to get to call the Secret Service.

But to add to the topic, the most money I've ever found was about $50.

Many years ago, as a young teen-ager, my parents had asked me to rake up the leaves in our front yard. About halfway through raking, I found a $5 bill in the leaves. Stuffed it in my pocket and didn't think much of it. A few minutes later, I found a $20. That got my attention. Raking continued and by the time I was done, I had found another $5 or two and a $10. All told, about $50, as I recall.

It didn't belong to anyone else in my family and my parents swore that it wasn't some sort of plant. I believe them as they wouldn't have paid me that much just to rake the leaves.

It was a good haul for an afternoon of leaf raking for a 13-14 year old kid.

And never once did it occur to you that you should just leaf it there?










God. I crack myself up.

I'll crack you up! Like a twig!

You're giving me a woody, d00d.

Well, I think it's important to branch out from my usual function.

Can we just get to the root of how to find 5.2 mil?

My best guess is that it's counterfeit and the guy "aged" it to try to hide that fact.

I wouldn't be so sure. The article says that this same guy has been doing this for years with different amounts. If it were counterfeit, I guarantee that the Feds would know about it and the guy would be in jail somewhere. You don't take a suitcase full of Monopoly money to the Fed and ask for a check. No, I'd bet it's all real money.

My completely uneducated guess? I bet that a couple of decades ago he found a crashed drug-smuggling plane out in the desert and managed to bring home a couple of duffel bags full of cash. Woohoo! But.. what would you do with it? I might do exactly what he did. Play it cool and lay low. Exchange small amounts as often as you can without raising suspicion. Obviously he got greedy with what was left (5.2M) and decided to try to exchange it all in one shot. Tsk tsk.

When I read this story a few days ago all I could think of was that it sounds like nice sequel to No Country for Old Man. Imagine an elder Chigurh trying to find that dude who's trying to exchange the money...

wacky story