Euro bills in Germany mysteriously disintegrating

You can be sure that the Unabomber is sitting in his cell smiling right now. This is an ingenius way to attack the structures of civilization he hates. The article below talks about extortionists, but what if it is something else entirely? If, like me, you think that human civilization has taken a few wrong turns and given the few too much and the many too little, what better way to attack the topmost hierarchy than to start paying your bills with notes that will simply disintegrate later. Imagine the joy of depositing a huge amount of ‘treated’ cash in the bank and then withdrawing the same amount of untreated money from another bank. Then treating the money, then doing it again. Imagine paying a slumlord with cash that has been treated to disintegrate or paying any number of other obligations that human society has created and forced us to bear. This is hopefully an attack on the financial backbone of our world civilization and hopefully it will succeed.
People may think that we need banks, credit cards, and huge multinational corporations to exist, but those people are wrong. What we need is mutual cooperation and equality. The best place to start is economic equality. My hat is off to the money disintegraters.
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BERLIN (AFP) – Investigators are attempting to learn why hundreds of euro bills in Germany have mysteriously disintegrated in recent months, the government and the country’s central bank have revealed.
An interior ministry spokesman confirmed a report in the daily Bild that state police in Berlin and the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate have opened probes after about 1,000 bills self-destructed.
“This is unprecedented,” a spokeswoman for the Bundesbank central bank said.
The case surfaced in June in Berlin when a 20-euro bill crumbled on contact. Police first suspected a fluke but the number of “broken notes”, as investigators have dubbed the bills, continued to rise in August.
Bild, which splashed the headline “Acid attack on our money!” on its front page, said that chemists believed the bills may have been sprinkled with a sulfate salt that becomes sulfuric acid when it comes in contact with moisture, such as hand perspiration.
The bills then gradually disintegrate.
A Berlin police spokesman confirmed that laboratory analysis of the bills had identified traces of sulfuric acid.
“To date we do not have any indication that a crime has been committed,” the spokesman said, adding that it was possible that an accident led to the contamination of the bills.
Investigators had told Bild that they suspected would-be extortionists were behind the case, aiming to prove they can destroy currency at will.
The interior ministry spokesman said it appeared Germany was the only country affected in the 12-member eurozone. One theory was that bank machines were the source of the contamination, he said.
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said it was possible the bills were stolen during a cash shipment and that the hijackers had used chemicals to remove anti-theft coloration that can be released when cash is stolen.
But he added that the ECB had no direct involvement in the case and that German authorities were handling the investigation.
The Bundesbank ruled out a printing or paper defect. Serial numbers confirm the bills were produced by the Federal Printing Press.
The spokeswoman said the affected bills posed no danger to the public and that consumers could exchange them at Bundesbank branches.
She noted that the chances of coming in contact with one were extremely low with five billion bills in circulation in Germany.