Are notes always scanned at supermarkets in your part of the world? Germany I think? But also, are they just scanned for fakeness or are you saying serial numbers are checked or something?
Discussion
Not always. They're been scanned for fakeness. At least that's the official statement. But who knows...
Neither scanned nor checked for serial numbers.
I was at a Döner place where to pay cash, I had to feed the cash to a machine. I'm pretty sure it's scanning the notes for more than being fake. At supermarkets the ever more popular self-service terminals probably process most of the payments by now also might scan whatever.
You can still opt out but as long as you have to actively opt out and know what scans your notes, it's an up-hill battle.
Do ATMs record the serial numbers? If so, why? If notes are fungible, they absolutely should not track that data linked to to your account. Do they do that? I assume so but cannot know. Same with the receiving machines that have scanning capability.
I've noticed Walgreens in the US now uses an unusually large scanning machine to scan 100s now. They used to just hit it with that pen that checks for counterfeit.
So after some reading on the subject, maybe in Germany the legal protection is still valued high enough to keep notes fungible, so serials might not be tracked at ATM and retail but who knows what the next big security bill does to that. Save the children, hooray!
This is part 1 https://netzpolitik.org/2025/bargeld-tracking-du-hast-ueberwachungsinstrumente-im-portemonnaie/#netzpolitik-pw
Part 2 is linked at the end. I’m pretty sure you know how to translate these articles 😉
The security company that transports the cash from the supermarket to the bank probably scans all the notes again. They would have a large enough size to make a reasonable business case out of that data, I assume.
Not very common here (countryside of Brazil)
It used to be common in my infancy, they used to check the note's watermark. But that was at a time where a 100 BRL bill was a lot of money (they used to be rare and you would be super badass to hold one). But nowadays they are worth less than $20 😥