Torn-up money in German city worth tens of thousands of euros

Last August, the residents of the southern German city started finding bits of money on the streets. And on sidewalks. And sometimes even outside of their homes or caught in the shrubbery. The question was whether it was real.

Some people tried taking the money to the banks. One way or another, by the end of September, 23 separate cases in which people found money were brought to the police. But it was hard to make heads or tails of the bills because they were heavily damaged.

The damage went beyond the regular wear and tear of bills changing hands: Darmstadters found over 8,000 pieces of banknote. The snippets were as small as a fingernail and rarely wider than 2.5 cm (1 inch) - likely a contributing factor to their dispersal across the city.

Darmstadt sent the pile of torn-up money to the Federal Bank, which then worked with the Fraunhofer Institute for Productions Systems and Design Technology (IPK) to start piecing together the puzzle.

It took nearly 10 months for the partnering analysts to determine how much money had drifted onto Darmstadt's streets. According to the head of the Federal Bank's National Analysis Center in Mainz, reconstruction began with assessing the actual paper. "Bank notes have special properties that can be verified even with the smallest sample," Rainer Elm told DW.

"The methods of virtual reconstruction resemble those used when putting together a puzzle," Fraunhofer Institute project head Jan Schneider told DW. The Berlin-based research team had to develop new techniques especially for this project. This allowed them to store the "puzzles" they had already solved by hand into a system, which then applied those properties to analyze the rest of the cash.

Both sides of each bank note were digitized for the large-scale analysis. "Euro banknotes have numerous images such as writing, graphics, microscript, holograms, etc.," Schneider told DW. And just like with a real jigsaw puzzle, the person putting it together must ultimately decide "whether two pieces fit together or not."

In the end, the two teams have determined there were several different denominations in the pile: 500-euro notes (138), 100-euro notes (24), 50-euro notes (355) and one 10-euro note. Fifty of the 50-euro notes have been restored, but many of the snippets are missing their mates and are, therefore, worthless.

The Darmstadt police originally estimated the 8,000 pieces of cash added up to over 15,000 euros. In fact, the total was six times that or roughly 90,000 euros ($100,200). It's still unclear where the money came from or why it was torn into thousands of pieces. If you have any information regarding this case, contact the Darmstadt police at +49 061516990 or at [email protected]