Your new plastic £5 note could be about to make you £500 richer

Collectors are going wild for Bank of England’s new plastic fivers, with one first print note just being sold for £570 on eBay. Are you about to get rich quick?
Bank of England just started circulating these new monopoly-esque notes last week, and already they’re going for big bucks online.

These new weird-looking fivers are made of polymer, meaning they’re pretty much indestructible. As you probably guessed, this prompted the internet to go wild with body builders attempting to tear them up (that didn’t work) and set them on fire to see if they were flammable (they were, so that wasn’t the smartest move).

Unfortunately for those who were successful with their burning efforts, it turns out that first prints of the new notes are now worth at least £200 – in fact, we just spotted one being sold for £520 this afternoon on eBay!

Collectors have now realised that first prints of these novelty plastic fivers (they may just be money, but they certainly don’t look or feel like it) will soon be worth a lot of dough. If the plan is to roll out plastic notes for all denominations, imagine you could say you have one of the first ever prints!

How to know if your fiver’s worth hundreds

Timing is everything in this game – if you happened to be passing a cash machine that distributes fivers early in the morning last Tuesday (13th) this could be the most fruitful cash withdrawal of your student years (unless you spent it, of course, then you'll probably be hating yourself right about now).

Any fivers taken from an ATM in major cities in England and Wales after midnight on Monday 12th September are likely to have a serial number of AA01. These are the notes going for big bucks, and if you’re lucky enough to have a few notes starting AA01 with sequential serial numbers following, you’ve struck gold!

If you've missed out on the super early serial numbers, it could still be worth holding on to your plastic note anyway if you can spare it, as the earlier prints could still be worth something later down the line.

The moral of this story is – keep an eye on any of these notes that cross your palm, try not to spend them for now if you can, and whatever you do, don't check if they're flammable.

Have you managed to get your paws on a first print fiver? Get in touch – we want to hear from you!