October 28, 1999
Making It Easy to Find
Where the Money Goes
By JULIE FLAHERTY
eorge was first spotted in Bremerton, Wash. He attended an arts festival in Seattle, made his way to a
coffee shop in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and was
last seen in Salt Lake City.
This particular George is a 1995-series
one-dollar bill, and his biography is made
possible by the Where's George? Web site,
which has thousands of people tracking
their money as it circulates through the
economy.
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Jim Bourg for The New York Times
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MONEY MAN Hank Eskin calls Where's George?, his bill-tracking site, a "fun diversion."
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Users type in their ZIP codes and the
serial numbers of any United States denomination up to $100. Then they write
"www.wheresgeorge.com" on the bills and
go out and spend them, banking on the
possibility that future owners will be curious enough to visit the site and update the
bills' travel history.
So far, 55,000 people have entered nearly
900,000 bills, or more than $5 million worth
of currency.
No, the site does not have a ticker clicking
off the Federal deficit or political statements about the evils of consumerism. Hank
Eskin, the 34-year-old database programming consultant who founded the site two
years ago, said he had simply come up with
the idea while pondering his pocket change
and its destiny.
"It's a fun diversion," Mr. Eskin said.
"Some people would call it a useless diversion."
It is also the kind of diversion that could
be possible only through the Web. Once a bill
is registered, the site reports the time between sightings, the distance traveled and
any comments from the finders. "I got this
at a strip club in Brooklyn," someone wrote
about one wild single. A man in Bakersfield,
Calif., who found a registered dollar bill the
day after a major tremor wrote that it
"survived the earthquake with the courage
of a C note."
On the site's forum, chatters compare
"hit rates"-- the percentage of bills they
send out that are reported found. Four percent is considered a good return. Serious
players buy Where's George? rubber
stamps ($15 through the Web site) to make
marking bills easier.
"I never thought it would get to this, but
people are obsessed by it," Mr. Eskin said.
"They'll come home and stamp and enter
bills before going out to dinner to spend
them. They'll get all their spouse's bills and
mark them and put them back." A man in
New Jersey has stamped more than 60,000
singles.
Joshua McGee, a software engineer in
Thousand Oaks, Calif., said the site had
changed his spending patterns. "I used to
use my debit card whenever I could," he
said. "Now I intentionally pay for things
with cash."
He said he had once purchased a VCR
with a stack of ones. "I asked the cashier,
'Could you use any singles?' which is a
wonderful entrapment phrase," Mr. McGee
said. He tracks his bills with a map, marking hits with pushpins. He had to expand to a
world map when a Swedish exchange student took one of his bills overseas.
There is competition to get the most hits
from the most interesting places. As in any
game, some players try to cheat. Mr. Eskin
continually updates his validation process
for the 10,000 bills that are entered into his
system daily, weeding out serial numbers
that are obviously false or bills entered
repeatedly by a person trying to claim a
better hit ratio. Purposely bringing bills to
other states and recording them there is
considered out of bounds, as is passing them
back and forth between family members in
different parts of the country.
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Devotees of the Web site
have taken to paying for
everything with marked
dollar bills.
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"We do like to be sure that the bills
actually enter circulation," Mr. Eskin said.
Some spenders adopt creative strategies:
taping a bill to a balloon and letting it fly,
leaving a 20-dollar bill in a book in a bookstore or putting a bill in a bottle and throwing it into a lake.
"It's self-advertising, which is really intriguing," Mr. Eskin said. "I don't know of
many businesses that do that. A friend of
mine at work said why don't I just stamp
'Saab' on all my dollar bills and advertise
Saab? Well, you can, but what's the point?"
While Mr. Eskin, who has an M.B.A. from
the Wharton School, would love to run his
own business, for now the site is just a
break-even hobby. Advertisements on the
site cover some of the cost of the server, but
not the 20 to 30 hours a week he spends
maintaining the site and answering questions, including the inevitable one.
"Every other day," he said, "I'll get an E-mail from somebody who asks, 'Don't you
know that defacing currency is illegal?' "
It can be, he said, if it renders the bill unfit
to be reissued -- by cutting off numbers to
change the denomination, for instance, or
altering serial numbers. But stamping
"Where's George" on a bill doesn't destroy
the bill, Mr. Eskin said.
"It's still a dollar bill," he said. "You can
still spend it."
Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman for the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing, agreed.
"According to the laws as they stand now,
the practice is not illegal," she said.
Even at $4.8 million, the marked money
amounts to less than one-thousandth of 1
percent of the currency in circulation. And
the Secret Service, which enforces the defacement law, has not bothered Mr. Eskin.
"They've got better things to do," he said.
"They want to catch counterfeiters counterfeiting billions of dollars."
It might be that very defiance of authority, that feeling of control over something
produced by the Government that fuels peoples' fascination with the site. It also fuels
suspicion of Big Brother.
"Every now and then someone will write
in, 'Did anyone ever think this is just a big
conspiracy by the Government to track
where our money goes?' " Mr. Eskin said.
"And a lot of time some of the regulars will
answer: 'No, the Government's not running
it. They couldn't build anything like this if
they wanted to.' "
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