Marking bills is a technique used by police to trace and identify money used in illegal activities. [1] [2] The serial numbers of the bills are recorded, and sometimes markings are made on the bank notes themselves (such as with a highlighter [3] or other writing [4] ).
Non-law enforcement uses of marking bills may be as simple as distinctive text [5] on the bank notes, or recording serial numbers in the event of a robbery. [6]
Perverted Justice Foundation, Inc., more commonly known as Perverted-Justice, was an American organization based in California and Oregon which investigated, identified, and publicized the conduct of adults who have used chat rooms and other social media in order to solicit online sexual conversations and in-person meetings with minors. Their website serves as an archive of collected data on these investigations, which they make available in order to assist law enforcement and the public in understanding the behavior and child grooming techniques of online hebephiles.
Randall Brent Woodfield is an American serial killer, serial rapist, kidnapper, robber, burglar and former football player who was dubbed the I-5 Killer or the I-5 Bandit by the media due to the crimes he committed along the Interstate 5 corridor running through Washington, Oregon and California. Before his capture, Woodfield was suspected of multiple sexual assaults and murders. Though convicted in only one murder, he has been linked to a total of 18 murders and is suspected of having killed up to as many as 44 people.
A home invasion, also called a hot prowl burglary, is a sub-type of burglary in which an offender unlawfully enters into a building residence while the occupants are inside. The overarching intent of a hot prowl burglary can be theft, robbery, assault, sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, or another crime, either by stealth or direct force. Hot prowl burglaries are considered especially dangerous by law enforcement because of the potential for a violent confrontation between the occupant and the offender.
A police car is a ground vehicle used by police and law enforcement for transportation during patrols and responses to calls for service. A type of emergency vehicle, police cars are used by police officers to patrol a beat, quickly reach incident scenes, and transport and temporarily detain suspects, all while establishing a police presence and providing visible crime deterrence.
On 20 December 2004, a total of £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the headquarters of Northern Bank on Donegall Square West in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Having taken family members of two bank officials hostage, an armed gang forced the workers to help them steal used and unused pound sterling banknotes. The money was loaded into a van and driven away in two trips. This was one of the largest bank robberies in the history of the United Kingdom.
Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum operated as a criminal fence to many of the street gangs and criminals of New York's underworld, handling between $1–5 million in stolen goods between 1862 and 1884. Like her principal rival John D. Grady and the Grady Gang, she also became a matriarch to the criminal elements of the city and was involved in financing and organizing numerous burglaries and other criminal operations throughout the post-American Civil War era. With George Leonidas Leslie, she was involved in the 1869 Ocean National Bank robbery and the 1878 Manhattan Savings Institution robbery.
A replacement banknote, commonly referred to as a star note, is a banknote that is printed to replace a faulty one and is used as a control mechanism for governments or monetary authorities to know the exact number of banknotes being printed. Also, since no two serial numbers can be the same, the bill is simply reprinted with a symbol in the serial number, identifying it as a replacement for an error note. Replacement bills have different symbols to mark the error around the world, although the most popular examples are "star notes".
On May 7, 2008, 23-year-old Rachel Morningstar Hoffman, was murdered by two drug dealers, 23-year-old Deneilo Bradshaw and 25-year-old Andrea Green after being pressured to act as a police informant in a botched drug sting by the Tallahassee Police Department. Her body was recovered two days later near Perry, Florida. Hoffman's death led to the implementation of "Rachel's Law", which imposed stricter requirements for law enforcement agencies for undercover informants operating in Florida.
Bait money or bait bills are bills with known serial numbers, used by banks to aid the tracing of bank robbers.
On Sunday 19 August 1962 a group of six men, with help of a bank’s safe-keeper, robbed a local branch of the National Bank of Poland, located in the town of Wołów in Lower Silesian Voivodeship. Altogether, 12,531,000 złotys were stolen, which in late 2000s (decade) prices, would make some 18 million złotys. It was the biggest bank robbery in the history of the People's Republic of Poland, to the point that the Polish government for a while considered withdrawing all 50-złoty and 100-złoty bills from the market, which would help find the robbers.
The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, also known as the Erivansky Square expropriation, was an armed robbery on 26 June 1907[a] in the city of Tiflis in the Tiflis Governorate in the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire. A Bolshevik group "expropriated" a bank cash shipment to fund their revolutionary activities. The robbers attacked a bank stagecoach, and the surrounding police and soldiers, using bombs and guns while the stagecoach was transporting money through Erivansky Square between the post office and the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire. The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others, according to official archive documents. The robbers escaped with 241,000 rubles.
SelectaDNA is a forensic property marking system used as part of crime prevention strategies for businesses and residential properties.
The StingRay is an IMSI-catcher, a cellular phone surveillance device, manufactured by Harris Corporation. Initially developed for the military and intelligence community, the StingRay and similar Harris devices are in widespread use by local and state law enforcement agencies across Canada, the United States, and in the United Kingdom. Stingray has also become a generic name to describe these kinds of devices.
Cellphone surveillance may involve tracking, bugging, monitoring, eavesdropping, and recording conversations and text messages on mobile phones. It also encompasses the monitoring of people's movements, which can be tracked using mobile phone signals when phones are turned on.
Bank of England £1,000,000 notes, also referred to as Giants, are non-circulating Bank of England sterling banknotes that were used to back the value of Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes in 1948. They were cancelled after six weeks, and only two are known to still exist.
A gun serial number is a unique identifier assigned to a singular firearm.
Peggy Jo Tallas was an American bank robber who would cross-dress as a man to conceal her identity, earning her the media epithet Cowboy Bob for always sporting a white ten-gallon hat. She robbed a total of five banks in Texas between 1991 and 1992 before she was caught by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but as Tallas never used a weapon during her robberies, she received a light sentence of 33 months. In 2005, after living quietly for the past decade, she committed suicide by cop after police caught up to her escaping the scene of her final bank robbery.