Cash Not Always Accepted

Today we bought a house! Deb­by and I have been try­ing to sell the house we are in and buy a house we love. After much back and forth involv­ing var­i­ous amounts of mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the buy­er we thought we had for our house backed out.

We love the house we found and Deb­by fig­ured out how to buy it even with­out sell­ing this one, but financ­ing changes were required. So there was plen­ty of nego­ti­a­tions with the bank and it was all worked out. Time was short. The real­tor was con­cerned that the sell­ers might not accept anoth­er delay of the closing.

The prob­lem is that the mon­ey has to be there. And it turns out that the bank would hold even a cashier’s check for a cou­ple of days. There was no alter­na­tive but to get cash. Deb­by went to the bank and with­drew the cash.* They put it in an enve­lope for her. She drove to Fort Wayne and pre­sent­ed the cash to the bank.

The teller exam­ined each bill.

Deb­by now has a receipt for the $400 that the bank has deter­mined may be coun­ter­feit and is deliv­er­ing to the Secret Service.

For­tu­nate­ly, the dol­lar amount Deb­by was giv­en was approx­i­mate and the $400 was not nec­es­sary to close.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we just might be out $400.

Some­thing wrong with that picture!

The bank informed Deb­by that there have been oth­er cas­es of coun­ter­feit hun­dreds in Fort Wayne recent­ly. In exam­in­ing the bills, the teller was focused on the date. I sus­pect that the bank has been informed to be on the look­out for bills of a cer­tain date and that some of Deb­by’s bills matched that cri­te­ria. It is pos­si­ble that the Secret Ser­vice will authen­ti­cate the mon­ey. At least, we hope so!

If it turns out that those bills are coun­ter­feit, then that means that one can­not be sure that the cash a bank gives out is in fact legal currency.

*This was not tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. Just sev­er­al hun­dred to cov­er the last bit needed.

2 thoughts on “Cash Not Always Accepted”

  1. I hope it works out well for you. Just a hint, some stores con­sid­er some cash to be coun­ter­feit because of the starch con­tent. If the paper is cheap, it will con­tain more starch than the starch-free paper that mon­ey is print­ed on. Hence, they will con­sid­er it coun­ter­feit and have the duty to seize the mon­ey. If they don’t seize the mon­ey they con­sid­er is coun­ter­feit, they are allow­ing coun­ter­feit cash to go into cir­cu­la­tion and have com­mit­ted a fed­er­al offense. It sounds to me like the first bank may just be caught under the same rules.

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