From https://www.moneyfactory.gov/resources/lawsandregulations.html:

It's none of "mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together", and also there's no intent to "render such item(s) unfit to be reissued".

Granny,

I'll let you in on a secret.

If you tear the tags off your mattresses, they don't really come out and arrest you.

Defaced currency is not "legally unusable".

Furthermore, vending machine bill validators work primarily on the fact that US currency has ink with fine magnetic particles in it, like audio tape, so that the ink pattern can be read by what are essentially audio tape heads inside the mechanism and compared with a reference pattern.

You might enjoy the "Where's George?" site.

If you ever get a dollar bill that's marked like this one:



You can go to wheresgeorge.com, type in the serial number, and see all the places it has been found by people who use that website (and enter your zip code to record where you got the bill).

Then you go and spend the bill, and see if it comes up again on wheresgeorge.com.

If someone doesn't want to take your funny looking $20 bill, that's up to them. 99.99999% of places won't care.

Jberryhill,

I'll let you in on a secret.

Granny knows what the term "except by consumer" means.

Granny also knows that sometimes people write on paper currency.

My concern was whether replacing the image on the bill would be considered defacement and render the bill unusable.

If you were planning on rolling it up to snort a line of coke, it will be just fine.

If One was looking to purchase a favor from some of the ladies on Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia, it would probably be usable for that too.

Now, whether some kid at the counter of a Taco Bell is going to let you buy a number four with a large Coke is, I would imagine, entirely within that kid’s jurisdiction to decide.

If the kid at Taco Bell won’t take it, then you could go to the nearest US District Court, pay $350 and file your civil complaint seeking an emergency injunction requiring Taco Bell to take your $20 bill.

In all likelihood, it will be a precedent-setting case since, as it turns out, there is very little federal case law, and no Supreme Court decision of which I’m aware, that reaches the precise question of whether the kid at Taco Bell has to take a $20 bill that someone stamped some ink upon.

I’ll help you draft up the papers if you like.

I'm betting some would try...

However they might not give out the same "defaced'" bill if they think it violates their policy. Banks can retire torn and defaced bills and not lose the value of the money. The US government simply replaces the torn and defaced bills with freshly printed ones for the same value. While the bills are still in circulation various people see what's written or stamped on the bills, but once they've been retired they get incinerated.

...counting out stacks from their registers. As long as there's no intent to defraud (say, by pasting a 20 over a 1 to pass it as counterfeit). Paper money wears out fairly rapidly.

During BushCheney a whole lot of us wrote things on the edges of paper money. "Impeach Bush" was popular, as were things about the unnecessary Iraq War.

If I can get a Tubman stamp, I might be back in business