I just came back from Bangkok where I emptied an old US dollar bank account I had at HSBC. I received a mix of bills an noticed how the US dollars have been changing design over the past 12 years. I didn’t think more of it…
… until I landed and tried to deposit them into my US dollar account at E.Sun bank the other day. They separated the bills that were older than 2016 and said they would not accept the others. Actually, they wouldn’t accept the new bills, too, at first, because each bill had a tiny ink blot (obviously made by the HSBC bank they came from).
I complained and asked to see the manager. After some face saving discussion between the teller and the manager, they agreed to take the new bills. When I asked what to do about the older ones, they said I could try to change them at Mega Bank or Taiwan Bank (because they were bigger banks, they explained).
Has anyone here successfully changed older US dollar bills at Mega or Taiwan Bank? Any advice?
Yeah this is weird, I have had older US bills that were in pristine condition yet they were fussy about exchanging them. I can’t remember which bank I was at but then the manager came and eventually they exchanged it.
It was like $80 us like wtf man.
Why do they care about the age of the bills? 2016 is two years ago, how is that an old bill.
Bank of Taiwan (I assume this is what you meant by Taiwan Bank) has rejected anything 1996 and earlier when I tried about 5 years ago). I doubt they would take anything earlier than 2009 now.
I would suggest saving them for travel and try your luck then, or if you’re from the States, save them for when you there.
The AIT says that it will accept the old ones. No idea if they would exchange old for new, or just accept old as payment for services, but you could always ask…
Nope. The HSBC banks in different countries are separate entities following local regulations. There is no way for HSBC Taiwan to do anything about it.
Just curious: How much did Esun charge you for depositing foreign currency? Maybe a SWIFT transfer from Thailand would have been cheaper?
Advice same as others: If you travel often, spend the money abroad. You could also try to exchange it at the airport, they should be more lenient(?)
One feature of US currency that I have always liked is that banknotes are legal tender no matter how long ago they were issued. This is not the case with British pounds. Businesses no longer accept older 5 and 10 pound notes.
I am now planning to receive a much larger amount by bank wire, so remembering this incident, I went to the bank first to ask how much it might cost me. It seems for the amount I am expecting (5x more than before), it will cost only a few hundred NT$ to received. I asked how much I would pay if I brought in that US$ amount in bills, and the person helping pulled up the current exchange rates and said they would take the difference betweent he buying rate and the selling rate (I think it’s the selling rate - on the computer monitor in the branch, we were looking at the first column and the very last column) and then she multiplied that difference by the amount, which came up to several thousand NT$!
tldr; you are absolutely right - the SWIFT transfer will be much cheaper
There has been a LARGE increase in the production and circulation of high quality forgeries in Europe (and some in America). Even in London you will have problems with anything but the newest $100.
Trust me on this - don’t do cash if you can help it at the moment - there’s a chance that if the bank teller doesn’t like you he’ll give you some of the bad ones they know about. I’ve seen it happen. Especially if it’s a large amount.
Before I came here we had people putting on American accents and trying to pay their bills (we had a veterinary hospital) in $100 bills, some pretending to be European bankers with fake 100 or 500 Euro notes. I knew this was a problem so we rarely got caught out. That was over a year ago.