Have you ever wondered where that dollar bill came from, or where it might end up after you spend it? When you think about "six degrees of separation", it can be amusing to wonder who had your money first, and who ended up with it.
That is the concept behind FollowTheFace.com.
An Inexpensive Hobby Anyone can Enjoy
FollowTheFace.com is a website that tracks the "natural and geographic" circulation of paper money.
The concept is that participants log into their free FollowTheFace.com account, enter the serial number of their currency, and then spend the dollar bill with the hopes that future owners of the bill will also enter it, thus tracking the bill around the country (or the world!). Any denomination of paper money (except $2.00 bills) can be tracked.
Marking Dollar Bills
Before entering the serial numbers for their dollar bills into the website, most people who track currency at FollowTheFace.com mark the bills so those who next received the bill know to go online to track it. Most people use a rubber stamp to mark their bills, but some use colored permanent markers.
Good effective wording for your marks (on 3 separate lines):
See where I've been!
Track where I go net!
www.FollowTheFace.com
Unfortunately, most currency doesn't get tracked, and "Face Followers" can wait months or years for a bill that they have entered and marked to be "hit" by someone else.
One may question the legality of writing on currency, and in fact, the another money tracking website was once investigated by the Secret Service (who told that site that they can't sell the tracking stamps themselves b/c it is considered advertising on currency). As long as the marks don't render the bill useless, it is legal to mark them.
Our Rules
The first basic rule is doing things in the proper order. EMS - Enter, Mark, Spend. First you enter your bills at the FollowTheFace.com website. Once your bills are entered, THEN you can mark them with either a rubber stamp or a fine-tip permanent marker. THEN you can spend your bills as you usually would!
Following this order prevents the problem of having a marked bill in circulation that hasn't been entered in the database.
The other big rule is to not "dump" large quantity of marked bills at any one merchant or bank. Your bills may be rejected by the bank if you do this!
Finally, there are rules about circulating currency, such as the rule that you can't enter a bill, then give it to a friend to enter, etc. This creates artificial "hits", and artificially inflates your FollowTheFace hit records.
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