Overview

• Automated serial-number readers have been deployed in ATMs, bank counters, retail cash registers, courier services and private cash centers, logging time and location data.
• Police and prosecutors are using these records to trace cash flows in money-laundering probes, ATM raids and ransom investigations.
• Companies such as Elephant & Castle IP compile scanned serials into searchable databases and provide the data to state authorities upon request.
• Data protection regulators, including Schleswig-Holstein’s Marit Hansen, caution that continuous logging of note serials erodes the anonymity consumers expect from cash.
• The banking trade group denies any cross-institutional sharing of serial-number data even as a Bundesbank memo predicts permanent adoption of automated tracking and flags the need for new legal safeguards.