Today in 2003, the Federal Reserve updated the $20 bill with new security features.
It was a slightly updated version of the major overhaul of the twenty that launched in 1998.
And that larger change led to a weird situation for some radio listeners in the Nashville area, who thought they would have to exchange the old bills before they became worthless.
News reports said this was the morning show on WRVW-FM, which decided to do a prank during Halloween week.
The DJs said they’d heard of another station in Memphis doing the same story.
One of them said on the air that they’d dropped by a local bank where the tellers were all wearing badges that read, “Have you recycled your $20 bills?”
Supposedly people had to take any of the old twenties that they had at home and exchange them for new ones, because the US was taking those bills out of circulation.
Oh, and that day was also supposedly the last day you could turn in the old bills before they lost their value.
The Federal Reserve had said earlier that it was not taking the old bills out of circulation; paper money wears out over time and they planned to just replace the old bills with new ones as needed.
And the radio hosts said later in the show that the story was a hoax.
But at least a few radio listeners who only tuned into the early part of the show, and maybe didn’t follow the ins and outs of the Fed that closely, rushed to their banks that morning for bill exchanges, only to find that they weren’t necessary.
Banks asked where their customers were hearing about this; when they got the answer, they started calling the radio station.
So did Nashville’s Federal Reserve branch and the Tennessee Bankers Association when they got wind of the hoax.
Station management was not happy with all this attention.
WRVW started running announcements each hour explaining that banks were not recycling old $20 bills, and they were sorry for the confusion, and they didn’t mean to mislead anybody.
As the station’s operations manager said afterward, “People are going to try different things and occasionally step in it.”
Starting tomorrow in Kansas, it’s the Lenexa Chili Challenge.
Hundreds of teams cook up their best recipes for chili as well as wings and salsa – there’s also live music, balloon art, face painting and a Kids Kornbread Contest.
And then maybe you go on a spiritual quest to find your soulmate?
Banks boo $20-bill radio hoax (The Tennesseean via Newspapers.com)
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