Check your wallet. How you can turn $2 into several thousand bucks

No one really gives a second glance to the lowly $1 bill when they pay for something.

But maybe they should start.

That’s because an error by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing nearly a decade ago inadvertently set off one of the biggest treasure hunts for currency collectors ever — one that could potentially turn two $1 bills into hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.

“While the mistake happened a while ago, people only put it together in the past few years,” said Costa Roupas, owner of Costa’s Coins & Currency in Libertyville. “There have been lots of unbelievable errors with currency, but nothing like this.”

Jon Soule, owner of R&R Coins & Collectibles in Downers Grove, has one customer on the hunt for a match to his bill.

“It is the new flavor of the month, but so far I’ve only had one guy come in and he only had the one bill,” Soule said. “There’s not much I can do with just the one bill, so I didn’t buy it.”

So what’s all the fuss about?

Well, all U.S. currency in circulation is supposed to have a unique serial number for its “series year.” However, in 2014 about 6.4 million “series 2013” $1 bills were printed in Washington, D.C. for the Federal Reserve in New York. Then two years later, the bureau printed 6.4 million more $1 bills with the exact same serial number at its second printing location in Fort Worth that were also bound for New York.

That put 6.4 million pairs of nearly identical $1 bills into circulation. The only way to tell them apart is a tiny “face plate number” near the bottom right corner of the bill that indicates where it was printed.

The duplicate serial numbers all begin with a “B,” then contain the numbers 00000001-00250000 or 03200001-09600000 and end with a star.

When the errors were discovered, collectors began trying to match the pairs. So far less than 200 pairs have been matched and fewer than that have been offered for sale. A matched pair was sold on eBay in 2022 for $25,000.

“It would be fantastic to find a pair,” said Steven Roach, an educator at the American Numismatic Association, a congressionally chartered nonprofit organization dedicated to the study and collection of currency and coins. “It’s a neat error and they are relatively scarce, but the likelihood of being able to match a pair is fairly slim.”

That’s largely because the life span of a $1 bill is about three years and most don’t travel that far from their point of origin. However, collectors and other experts say these bills have a few things going for them that might extend their life and reach.

“The star at the end of the serial number means they’re replacement notes for bills with those serial numbers,” said Mike Nottelman, a numismatist at Chicago-based rare coin dealer Harlan J. Berk Ltd. “People have indiscriminately pulled star notes out of circulation for years thinking they are rare, even though they aren’t.”

And because they were released in one of the largest and most visited cities in the world, there’s a chance they could have been distributed much farther than most other dollar bills, some believe.

The hunt to match pairs has gained steam in recent months thanks to several social media posts highlighting the anomaly. However, that hasn’t really translated into a lot of additional traffic at most suburban businesses that specialize in rare coins and currency.

Considering there are more than 14 billion $1 bills in circulation currently, finding one of the 12.8 million duplicates is a long shot already. That’s not even 1/100th of a percent of all the $1 bills in circulation. And finding its pair is almost mathematically impossible.

That’s were Project 2013B comes in. It’s a website that catalogs which bills have been located and attempts to match the owners of the pairs. So far, the website at project2013b.blogspot.com, has matched 118 pairs among the more than 57,000 bills that have been submitted.

The curator of Project 2013B is a Canadian collector who asked only to be identified as Johnny A. He said bills have been cataloged from owners in Europe, South America and Africa as well as the majority coming from North America.

Like most collectibles, the more rare something is, the more valuable it becomes. So the converse is true with these dollar bills. The more pairs that get matched, the less valuable they become.

“We sold a pair for $6,600 last year,” said Dustin Johnston, vice president and director of the currency department at Heritage Auctions. “The next set we sold in January for $3,600, that’s almost half the value in just seven months.”

The key to a good error on currency, Johnston said, is its visual appeal. Smudges, smears, bad press cuts and other mistakes that the eye catches immediately are often the most valuable at auction.

Visual appeal is probably why a collector spent $396,000 in 2021 for a $20 bill with a banana peel sticker on it. The bill was going through its third printing cycle when the sticker landed on it face up and had the treasury seal and serial number printed over it.

“That’s a one of a kind,” Johnston said.