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Best Buy Has Man Arrested for Using $2 Bills
An anonymous reader writes "Mike Bolesta of Baltimore thought he would protest Best Buy's not-so-great customer service and pay his bill with 57 $2 bills. For his trouble he got to spend some time in the county lock-up." From the article: "..Bolesta was contacted by the store, and was threated with police action if he did not pay the [installation] fee he was told before did not exist. As a sign of protest, Bolesta decided to pay using only $2 bills, which he has an abundance of because he asks his bank for them specifically. Unfortunately for him, the cashier did not seem to understand that the $2 bill is indeed legal US tender, since the bill itself is not often used. After rudely refusing to take the money, the cashier accepted the bills, only to mark them as though they were conterfeit."
From the Guerilla News Network, perhaps the original interview:
"I'm sitting there in a chair. The store's full of people watching this. All of a sudden, [a Baltimore County cop is] standing me up and handcuffing me behind my back, telling me, 'We have to do this until we get it straightened out.' Bolesta was then taken to the county police lockup in Cockeysville, where he sat handcuffed to a pole and in leg irons [for three hours] while the Secret Service was called in."
Best Buy isn't the worst villain here. Beware Baltimore County...
<grrr>
Best Buy security guards (aka "rent-a-cops") do not have the authority to make an actual arrest, but in some states can have limited authority to temporarily detain someone while waiting for the real police to arrive. (btw, IAAL)
Uh...no. The $2 bill, like any other bill, is "legal tender for all debts, public and private." The government says YOU MUST ACCEPT IT. Unlike the various currencies of old, it's not an IOU note for gold or some such inherently valuable thing. It's called "fiat" money--worth $2 because the government says so. Good thing you're an AC, so we can't make fun of you for sleeping through high-school economics.
Wozniak got in trouble for paying with $2 bills, too. Although, his story is a little funnier: http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
but during a radio program I was listening to, it was reported that the $2 bills were sequentially numbered and that the anti-counterfeit ink smeared on one of the bills. If this is true, then it may not be so far fetched that the police would have been contacted. Does this justify an immediate arrest in handcuffs? No, but if true, it does lend some light to why Best Buy would have acted the way they did, and it would give them one hell of a defense against a defimation suit.
Not entirely true. You must accept it for DEBTS. You do not have to accept it for products and services yet to be rendered. In this case, they are not obligated to accept it.
This was a case where the customer had something installed, and after the fact Best Buy decided to charge him for installation. It was a debt.
Yeah, you are only required to accept legal tender to pay off a preexisting debt. But this was a preexisting debt.
He had bought the radio the day before, and the employee then told him that the installation fee was waived because of a mixup, so he went home thinking the transaction was complete. The next day Best Buy called him and told him that if he didn't come in and pay the installation fee they would call the police. So he came in and tried to pay off the pre-existing debt with legal tender. The cashier then called the police because she thought it was fake.
So employees of this store broke the law at least once during the transaction. The manager should definitely be sued, and the staff sacked.
It was not as simple as not recognising $2 bills.
The cashier noticed smearing of the ink - which apparently was actually there. The $2 bills may have been the first thing that got her notice but the smeared ink on them is what she claims made her suspicious enough to call her manager.
When the officer came, he noticed that the bills all had sequential serial numbers - apparently a common sign in counterfeit currency.
At that point, given the smeared ink and the sequential serial numbers, the officer felt he had grounds to detain the man until the secret service could be called.
Now it turns out that, according to the secret service officer, the ink on legitimate bills does smear from time to time. I'd not heard of that, I'm guessing most people hadn't.
The fact that he gets them as a custom withdrawl from his bank - which probably has absolutely no other use for $2 bills - explains the sequential serial numbers. They likely get them relatively directly from the treasury in large batches and only issue from those large batches to him.
None of this proves he was a criminal - it was all completely explainable.
But it wasn't a simple case of not recognising $2 bills. The smeared ink and sequential serial numbers were enough for the officer to detain him until an explanation could be verified.
It may suck but the officer had reasonable grounds to detain him until he could confirm the story. I would imagine, in the majority of cases where suspect money comes up, the person caught tries feeding a story. At the end of the day, the question is whether you believe it's right to occasionally wrongfully detain one person or regularly let go many. Rightly or wrongly, the concept of reasonable grounds enshrines the former.
Let's clear this up:
FAQs: Currency
Legal Tender Status
Question I thought that United States currency was legal tender for all debts. Some businesses or governmental agencies say that they will only accept checks, money orders or credit cards as payment, and others will only accept currency notes in denominations of $20 or smaller. Isn't this illegal?
Answer The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 102. This is now found in section 392 of Title 31 of the United States Code. The law says that: "All coins and currencies of the United States, regardless of when coined or issued, shall be legal-tender for all debts, public and private, public charges, taxes, duties and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
From the faq.
Kill, Tux, kill!
'Try not to confuse the poor cashier' is a nice sentiment, and it's all well and good if you're a patient person. But some people are just stubborn, and if they know they're in the right then they won't alter their habits. People should not ever get chucked in a cell just because they're stubborn.
Santa's suicide mission go!
After my recent trip to the US (I live in the UK), I was baffled to why on earth the lowest base denomination was a note (bill) instead of a coin, meaning that vending machines are forced to accept bills *and* coins, unlike in the UK where everything up to £2 (1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 pence, then £1 and £2) are all in coins.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
If anyone else cares to to write or call them: Customer Service Inquiries Best Buy Corporate Customer Care P.O. Box 949 Minneapolis, MN 55440 1-888-BEST BUY (1-888-237-8289) Corporate Headquarters Best Buy Co., Inc. Corporate Headquarters P.O. Box 9312 Minneapolis, MN 55440-9312 612-291-1000 Many companies still seem to ignore online feedback, I've found. A deluge of angry geeks would be rather just.
What scares me (and surprises me a little, though less than it probably should) is that this guy made it all the way to the county lock-up on the suspicions of one cashier
They interviewed this fellow on local radio last week. He said something to the effect of this:
The police sympathized with him and pretty much knew he was innocent, but they still could not make that judgement call themselves and had to wait for the Secret Service to arrive and verify that they were in fact not counterfiet.
The US government is well known around the world for NOT changing their currency. Anything minted since the last 1800s is still legal. This is a good thing when your currency is a standard around the world, everyone recognizes it (well everyone where the black market is significant, I suspect western Europe doesn't care cause they have a useful currency). Of course the downside is those old bills are easy to counterfit. Still by not eliminating the old currency they do help the acceptance of the dollar around the world, which is a feature.
There are not many different coins of the same denomination. The 50 cent piece hasn't been made in years, it has been phased out just like your currency, the only difference is we never quit accepting it, we just quit using it. Everything else has only seen minor changes since the late 1800s. (sometimes one face changes. the metal in some of them changed, but overall everything looks similar to what they made 100 years ago
Thomas Jefferson. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is on the back. One of the more lucid bits of artwork from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.
Pardon me for interjecting, but I did RTFA a day or two ago when this appeared elsewhere...
The basic sequence of events were as follows:
1: Disgruntled customer arrives at store intending to pay invoice with $2 bills.
2: Employee isn't familiar with the $2 bill and refuses to accept as payment.
3: Fast-forward - Police arrive to sort the matter out. Ink on the bills smears a bit. Suspicions of counterfit money result.
4: Customer is handcuffed and brought to police station for further questioning/investigation.
5: U.S. Secret Service agents (yes, the're the final authority on U.S. currency) arrive and release customer after bills are inspected and found to be completely legit.
In this particular case, the local police probably knew about $2 as legitimate U.S. currency, but were suspicious when the ink on the bills smeared a bit. After the Secret Service inspected the bills, they informed the local police (paraphrasing), "They do that, sometimes."
Under the circumstances, the whole situation could have been avoided by a little education on the part of the Best Buy cashier. I still think this needs to be done, and rather painfully. However, the local police seemed to follow proper protocol. Ink on U.S. currency doesn't usually smear or smudge because it's usually handled often enough for the excess to wear off quickly. The $2 is not generally handled as much and this seems to be a perfect example of why it isn't.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Coins cost twice as much to mint (4 cents vs 8 cents for a dollar coin), sure, but that's only a minor part of the equation. Coins last in circulation for about thirty years, while a bill needs to be replaced after just twenty two months. The GAO estimates that it costs $522 million a year to keep printing dollar bills rather than mandating a switch to coins.
That said, I hate dollar coins. I have enough change, I don't need more. Bills are easier to manage from a consumer standpoint.
You might want to use more then one sock. It doesn't takem much weight to tear out a sock when swinging and then the mugger has all your money and you are now defensless with a piss off criminal.
I remeber stuffing rocks inot socks and taking beating things with it when i was younger (that and a mini baseball bat). After one or two swings with about a half pound of rocks, the end was gone and the rocks came out. Place 2 socks together and you could pound all day.
The whole "protecting the president" assignment came decades later, and while it's the task they're currently best known for, a large part of their work still goes towards the original goal. The Secret Service has field offices in all major US cities and many locales overseas, and when you consider that the president can only be in one place at a time (and is not constantly being threatened in all the other places where USSS has a presence), it becomes evident that most of the manpower is spent doing other things.
Among those other things, they assist with certain fraud investigations, especially mail fraud. When I worked in a retail postal facility, we'd get calls from USSS almost as often as USPIS. More recently, they've been called upon by various agencies to help investigate computer-related crimes, financial ones in particular. For example, they have an office specifically dedicated to investigating "419" scams (those emails you get from Prince Mambuto's widow in Nigeria who wants to transfer ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to your bank account) - next time you get one, forward it to 419.fcd(at)usss.treas.gov with a quick note that you didn't lose any money.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Let me add a couple of examples to further the point that you made.
Scenario 1: You go to the corner store, grab a 6-pack of Heineken, and walk to the checkout counter. The cashier tells you that your total is $7.48. You put four $2 bills on the counter. The cashier says, "We don't take those." The cashier is not violating the law; you have no debt to the store, the beer is still technically theirs. The store is not required to accept any particular form of payment from you.
Scenario 2: You go to the bar, grab a stool, and order a Heineken. The bartender brings it to you, and you drink it. You go to leave, and the bartender tells you that your total is $2.25. You put two $2 bills on the bar (and being a good patron, you tell the bartender to keep the change, of course!). The bartender says, "We don't take those." The bartender is violating the law. When you drank the beer, you incurred a debt to the bar; the bar is now obligated to accept any legal tender as payment.
Re: "the law," it's 31 USC 5103.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Um, no. "Dollar" comes from "thaler", short for "joachimsthaler", a valley in medieval Germany where cold was mined and high-quality coins were minted.
There is a reason for that: forgery. The ECB went for the security-through-obscurity route when forgery-proofing their bills. There are over 20 characteristics that distinguish a real Euro note from a fake one, unfortunately the banks only saw fit to disclose half of them, leading to the situtation that currently only banks can distinguish fake from real.
Of course, shopkeepers can't do so, but since the bank won't accept forged notes that businesses accepted in good faith, they end up being liable for the damage. Therefore shops decided en masse to no longer accept large denominations. The way things are going, the EUR 50 note will have to be redesigned, or it will end up being on the black list too.
Of course, the ECB could just publish all anti-forgery characteristics. But then, the argument goes, the forgers have it easier. Funny that the Dutch didn't seem to have that problem. As far as I know the central bank always published all details, confident that the measures were good enough to stop forgeries, and making it easy on businesses to detect the occasional ones. This suggests strongly that the anti-forgery measures on the Euro bills are just plain not good enough.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Here's the homepage for the moronic Baltimore County Government. Take the time to give them a call next week and express how proud they make you to be a "nervous" American! Baltimore County
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!