Where's George?

www.wheresgeorge.com

I found this site a couple days ago (via Wikipedia...), and it's a fairly interesting prospect. The idea is fairly simple: enter paper money into the database, mark it (most popular seems to be rubber stamps), and use it per normal. Then you hope someone will notice the URL on the dollar bill, go to the site, and enter it again (called a hit). I imagine a lot of people will ignore such a marking, but it's still quite fun.

Here's an example bill that I marked (yeah, I did all 77 in pen @_@ I will buy a stamp to do it):


For those people not native to the United States, there's Where's Willy? for Canadian paper money, and a bunch of other sites for other currencies (including Euros, Swedish kronor, etc).

In the system so far, I've entered 77 bills totaling $199:
BY DENOMINATION:
$2 bills - 57 (big fan of $2 :P)
$1 bills - 15
$20 bills - 3
$5 bills - 2

BY SERIES:
2003A - 66
2003 - 4
2004 - 3
2006 - 3
2001 - 1

STAR NOTES:
One $20 bill, series 2004

BY FEDERAL RESERVE BANK:
San Francisco (L) - 65
Chicago (G) - 5
Richmond (E) - 3
New York (B) - 2
Boston (A) - 1
Dallas (K) - 1

BY BLOCK LETTER (last serial number letter):
* - 1
A - 59
B - 5
D - 1
E - 2
F - 1
G - 3
I - 3
M - 1
Q - 1

BY ZIP CODE:
89199, Las Vegas Nevada - 77 (I'm here until April 3)

Very cool, I'll be checking out Where's Willy personally.

yeah, I did that once with a dollara couple of years ago. in two days it went from the store in brroklyn I used it in, to new jersey, and then to pensylvania. after that I got bored with and never checked again.

My mate put a funfax Spy File "spy bug" sticker on a penny once, used it in a shop, left a week then got it back as change when he bought something there

I have a dollar bill with wheresgeorge.com stamped on it.

Thing is I'm in the UK.

Seems it's illegal to do it here in the UK

"Concerning notes, the Currency and Bank Notes Act 1928 says If any
person prints, or stamps, or by any means impresses, on any bank note
any words, letters or figures, he shall, in respect of each offence,
be liable on summary conviction to a penalty not exceeding one pound.
The penalty was changed to £25 in 1977 (Criminal Law Act, s.31) and to
£200 in 1982 (Criminal Justice Act, s.46)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk_archive/July_2004

Yeah, I was wondering up to what point you may deface money till it's worthless or you can get in trouble. For the US there's this.

I'd say, in any case, that what this site does and encourages is a form of spam.

These pages seem to be banned towards some parts of the world, as I can't see either the George site nor the Willy site unless I use a proxy.

Deviating slightly off-topic - Australian ISP's will soon be required to filter out "undesirable sites and content". Where's Willy will probably be mistaken for a porn site. :-)

Back on-topic - Don't see many defaced currency notes down here - though plastic is harder to mark than paper.

AirRaid said:

I have a dollar bill with wheresgeorge.com stamped on it.

Thing is I'm in the UK.

WG can track internationally too :P

in the US, most stamping on bills is not illegal, so long as you don't cover important features and such. It's kind of a fine line, but it's easy to do legally.

Who's really going to care enough to enforce it anyway?

MikeRS said:

WG can track internationally too :P

in the US, most stamping on bills is not illegal, so long as you don't cover important features and such. It's kind of a fine line, but it's easy to do legally.

Of course it can, but where am I ever going to spend a dollar bill? The trail ends here. I don't even know where it is now. I probably lost it.

Australian ISP's will soon be required to filter out "undesirable sites and content"

Wait, what?

Is Australia turning into China?

Yeah, WTF. As far as I know, the only other countries to do that are China, North Korea, and Cuba. OMFG commies. I think Iran toyed with the idea too, but I'm not sure if they implemented it.

I read this topic yesterday, and today at work I got a dollar bill from a customer with wheresgeorge.com/ stamped on it. Weird.

Danarchy said:

As far as I know, the only other countries to do that are China, North Korea, and Cuba. OMFG commies.

Singapore too has some restrictions of that nature.

I did this with a couple of bills a while ago. I got one that had the site printed on it and I found out it had migrated all the way from North Carolina before getting to DC. Wrote it on two or tree more bills and havent done it since :P

deathbringer said:

Wait, what?

Is Australia turning into China?

You haven't heard? Our newest PM can speak fluent Mandarin.