Follow the Money: It's Online 

Sometimes the hits come quickly. Last week, Adam entered 25 US$20 bills into the database before depositing them in the bank. A different user re-entered eight of the bills into the database less than three hours later.

That's slightly higher than the site-wide average hit rate of 3 percent -- a rate that still might seem surprisingly high. After all, the $1,987,000 worth of bills entered into the database represents less than one thousandth of 1 percent of the $492.2 billion paper bills in circulation. According to the US Treasury's Bureau of Printing and Engraving, an average of $541 million in bills are printed everyday.

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The trick, according to site users, is marking bills with the Where's George URL. Eskin even sells a self-inking stamp to mark bills.

"My first hundred or so bills were marked with black ball point pen, the URL in the margin. The hit rate was pretty abysmal," said Cloister Bell, a 29-year-old technical writer from Seattle. "Then I got my stamper, and I'm sure you can do the math as well as I can."

Marking bills with the URL falls into a gray area of the law, according to a spokesman for the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

"This borders on the concept of defacement," said Jim Marshall. "But the Secret Service gives pretty good latitude to what you can do.... If you're writing on the currency in such a manner to make the currency messy, you've made it unfit to be reissued, so that's illegal. But if, for example, you write lightly with a pencil or something, that's another [matter]. Really, it's an iffy situation."

A spokesman for the US Secret Service would not comment on the legality of the Where's George stamp.

Most users aren't worried about the legal issues.

"It's terrific fun to see where your bills end up, to exchange stories with other users," said Joshua McGee, a software engineer at the Rockwell International Science Center in Thousand Oaks, California, who has entered more than 2,000 bills.

"The community aspect is among the best I've found on the Web."

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More stories written by Joe Ashbrook Nickell