Paul Diaz, the manager of a Bronx supermarket, began detecting the strange $1 bills last Monday. Some tiny number-letter combinations on the face and back were missing or in the wrong place, George Washington's hairline was receding excessively and a white spot under his right eye should not have been there.
He took the bills to the bank. Tellers thought they were counterfeit, so he stopped accepting them from customers. Hundreds of odd $1 bills were turned away in the next few days.The word spread. Across the metropolitan area, other stores began spotting discrepancies and refusing to take the bills. In the Miami area, merchants and consumers also began shying away from funny-looking $1 bills.
For six weeks now, it happens, concerned citizens across the East have been calling the Secret Service, the nation's watchdog against counterfeit currency, to inquire about the suspicious bills.
In recent days, the volume of calls from stores, banks and ordinary people mounted steadily into the thousands.
Thursday, alarmed over the spreading public perception that millions of counterfeit $1 bills were in circulation, the New York field office of the Secret Service issued an unusual statement saying that the strange-looking ones are not counterfeit, only the result of a new, cheaper printing process.
And the Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington also issued an unusual advisory to assure the public of the authenticity of some 200 million $1 bills - nearly 4 percent of the nation's $1's - that it had printed and sent to Federal Reserve Banks to put into circulation throughout the East since June 1992.
The circumstances suggested a couple of intriguing mysteries: Why did it take the public 17 months to detect the changes? And how did the word spread like wildfire in New York and Miami once they were spotted?
But there seemed to be less mystery about the changes themselves. Some were technical, relating to the Treasury's own codes on bills.
But others appear to have been inadvertent and touch on what the American public has long assumed was an inviolable truth about its currency: that its quality was, and always would be, uniform.
"In all my years of experience, I've never seen the U.S. Mint making errors like that," said Diaz, the manager of a Pioneer Supermarket in East Tremont, the Bronx, who noted white blotches on Washington's head and on bordering leaves, where delicately traced lines had appeared on old $1 bills.