Banco de Portugal has already received, in the last 10 months, more than one and a half million euros in damaged banknotes. It has everything: charred, cut, spoiled by humidity. The ones that are in the worst condition are the 5 euro ones.
The Portuguese continue to like burying money, a common practice for several decades, for security reasons. The newspaper writes that this ritual can be linked to disbelief in banks.
But the practice has consequences: in the last 4 years, Banco de Portugal has always received more than one million euros per year in ruined notes. In the last ten months, it has already been one and a half million euros.
“People think money doesn’t get ruined. It’s not true”, he tells Público José Luís Ferreira, area coordinator of cash operations at Banco do Portugal.
In these situations, the Bank’s work is always complicated: in the case of fraud, the owner of the notes may not see the amounts refunded. It is, therefore, necessary to prove that the reason for the bad condition of the money matches the description of the person who delivered it. When it is possible to prove it, the person receives their money back in their bank account.
There are several common ways to waste money. The most common way is to bury it: After some time, the notes appear gnawed, but they are only deteriorated by the humidity of the earth, becoming unusable.
According to the Bank of Portugal, the number of damaged banknotes increased in 2022, which may be related to the pandemic, when people wanted to have more “live” money stored: “It is known that during the pandemic the reserve of value increased, being therefore expected that, Once the pandemic ended, people who kept valuables at home, and if these had become deteriorated, they had been presented to the Bank of Portugal for exchange”.
“From our experience and with regard to the effects of circulation and all banknote processing activities”, explains the Bank of Portugal, “on average, the banknote that arrives at the central bank in worse conditions is the five euro note“.
In 2017, another common way of ruining money had to do with fires. “To the notes were charred inside safes, boxesetc.”, recalls José Luís Ferreira. Water used to put out fires can also damage banknotes.
Also the notes torn are common, due, for example, to damage caused by pets. In these cases, to prove that all the pieces correspond to the same note, the Bank uses a software computer that analyzes the dimensions of the pieces.
However, experts warn of fraud by people who try to show fake moneyas is the case with whitish notes that claim to have been damaged in washing machines, and which are, in fact, counterfeit notes.
Bruno Ratocoordinator of the central cash operations unit at Banco de Portugal, believes that increasingly recurring natural phenomena, such as floodsthe number of occurrences of these incidents should increase.
