Collectors’s world is full of objects you can’t even begin to imagine: from photographs or works of art, to antiques or postcards; if it has any attribute that makes it unique, there will be someone in the world who is willing to pay large amounts of money to get it.
Among the curiosities that are usually looked by collectors is money, whether they are coins or bills, which have some characteristic that makes them unrepeatable.
That is why a series of dollar bills that came out with a certain printing error can be sold for up to $ 150,000 a piece.
A very expensive mistake
What is special about these dollars? It turns out that, unintentionally, two groups of 6.4 million banknotes each came into the market with the same serial numbers, the first in 2014 and the second two years later, in 2016.
The error comes directly from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the official body in charge of printing legitimate US banknotes. In few words all of these banknotes are reliable despite having lost a twin somewhere.
Although the first group was distributed in New York and the second in Washington, the truth is that the pairs can be anywhere in the country or even the world, so putting the pairs together is a monumental task
The hunt begins
To this day, only 9 of the 6.4 million pairs of banknotes that were printed have been found, but both collectors and authorities are already looking for the twins to have better control and handling of the error of years ago.
That is why the Zegers / Winograd Project was launched, a plan that seeks to put those people who have one of the banknotes in this series in contact with whoever has the equivalent, and from there the two of them will be able to decide what to do with them.
Likewise, the plan already seeks to connect these couples with people interested in acquiring the tickets, saving them the trouble of auctioning them themselves if that is what they want.
Banknote characteristics
To be considered a legitimate piece in this series, there are several criteria that dollars must meet if you plan to auction them or contact whoever has their twin.
First of all, these notes must have been issued by the New York Federal Reserve in 2013 with some serial number between B00000001 and B00250000, or between B03200001 and B09600000.
Additionally, these serial numbers must end with a star and the note must have the Federal Reserve “B” stamp on the front, on the left side of the George Washington image.
As we mentioned, these bills are probably already scattered around the world after at least 5 years of circulation, so even if you don’t live in the United States, if you have a dollar you can be the lucky creditor of a huge sum of money.
Translated by Mariana R. Fomperosa
