The Damaged Nickel Experiment

So I came across a penny a few days ago that it looked like someone took a pick axe to.  So this got me wondering could a piece of currency be damaged to such a degree that a retailer would not accept it?

Why?

Because this interests me to a great degree.  It’s pretty cheap to perform this experiment.  Plus if I give a retailer exact change they are forced to count it, and notice the damaged nickel.

Is this legal?

Based on my internet lawyering I found the following statue:

Section 331 of Title 18 of the United States code provides criminal penalties for anyone who fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the Mints of the United States. This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent.

So that being the case I don’t think I am committing any sort of fraud in that I am not trying in increase the value of the coin, nor am I lighten the coin.  If anything I’m actually trying to see at what level I can deface a coin to devalue it to zero.

Method

So bending nickel is actually fairly easy with the right tools.  The nickels I bent as pictured above were done by placing the nickel in a vice and a few good whacks with a hammer.  Depending upon how this first batch of nickels goes, I may need to further deface the coin.  I think it would be curious to flatten the nickel (while not reducing the weight, as to stay legal) to such a point where none of the text or even textures are readable.  Or dip a nickel in paint.

Experiment 1: Pei Wei in Lewisville, TX

So I had lunch with my girlfriend out there.  Paid in cash, and some 91 cents in change.  I gave the clerk 86 cents plus a damaged nickel.  So immediately the cashier noticed the nickel and made a comment of ‘Where did you get this nickel?’, then further went on to say ‘Looks like someone ran over it with a train’.  I didn’t exactly give him an answer and simply shrugged.  He took the nickel for the value of a nickel, experiment 1 failed.

Ideas for future experiments

Gas stations, banks, Sonic (because they have those coin dispensers so certainly they would notice when trying to refill their dispenser).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 10:21 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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