Episode 781: The Money Fixers

By Jacob Goldstein,

Published June 30, 2017 at 4:54 PM EDT

When your life savings gets torched in a house fire or put through a shredder, there is a roomful of people who may be able to help: a team of specialists with the legal authority and technical skills to say whether messed up money lives or dies. They are the people of the Mutilated Currency Division.

On this episode, we go inside the Mutilated Currency Division. We find stories of a cow with an appetite for currency, a hundred thousand dollars stuffed into a mailbox, and a court battle between the government and millions of dollars in mutilated money

Music: "Burn in Me" and "Firmament." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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Jacob Goldstein

Jacob Goldstein is an NPR correspondent and co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He is the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.

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Elizabeth Kulas

Elizabeth Kulas is a producer on Planet Money. Before that, she produced shows at WNYC, Gimlet and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2016, she was part of the NPR team that reported on the Wells Fargo banking scandal. That reporting won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before falling in love with making audio, she studied Art History and German, with a focus on life in the former East Germany. She graduated from The University of Melbourne in her native Australia, with stints at Barnard College, New York and Berlin's Free University. Right now, she's entirely obsessed with space.

See stories by Elizabeth Kulas