Sale of old Rs500 note worth Rs7,00,000 on ebay

We all use currency to buy stuff, but have you ever spent currency to buy more currency? Well, we hope you haven t because, that s nothing but illegal. However, way past the law and order, eBay India currently has about 89 listings of old and new Rs 500 currency notes, being sold on the platform. And these notes are priced starting Rs 7,000 and go up to Rs 7,00,000..
The natural question that comes to the mind reading this is Why the hell??!! . Well, that s a legitimate question. So, all these notes are being sold for some specific reason or the other, which claimingly make them unique.

Many of these notes have been listed because the serial number on them end with the digits 786 , which people in some religion consider auspicious. Then there are some which are selling for thousands of rupees because they are signed by C Rangarajan, or S Venkataraman, both of who are ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. If they are old notes they would, of course, have the governor s signature on them.

Then there is one being sold for a lakh, which is just listed as a crisp, 10-alpha-numeric rare note.

First of all, whether buying or selling, this is just illegal. However, the bigger question here is how is eBay not regulating what gets listed on its platform. Yes, of course, when it s an open platform it s hard to keep a real time track of everything that gets listed, but many of these are at least a week old post and they still exist.

We tried to get in touch with eBay India regarding the same but failed to receive any response.

This isn t the first time such listings have come to notice. Two years ago, Madhya Pradesh high court slapped notices to online classifieds/trading portals OLX, Quikr and Ebay for providing a platform to speculators for auctioning Indian currency notes at a much higher price than their face value. Back then, these platforms were noticed listing sale of old Rs 10 note with the serial number with suffix 786 being auctioned at an exorbitant price of Rs 25,000. Similarly, the portals also had ads offering bank notes with the serial number representing their birth date. .