Man uses common cents, pays for speeding ticket with 22,000 pennies
To some, what Brett Sanders did after getting a speeding ticket will make no cents. To others, it may be completely priceless.
Sanders, who lives in Frisco, Texas, got ticketed for driving nine miles over the speed limit near his neighborhood. The amount he owed? $212. (With a processing fee, that comes to $222.60.)
That was unfair, thought Sanders. "I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't endanger anybody's life," he told NBC affiliate KXAS-TV.
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Calling it "extortion" in the comments of a video he made about what he did next, Sanders decided to cash out with a big bang. He collected approximately 22,000 pennies from the bank and dumped the change into two buckets he spray-painted with the words "extortion money."
Next stop: Municipal court, where he dumped both buckets on the clerk's countertop. No surprise, a lot of pennies ended up on the floor.
"It felt great," he said.
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The clerks weren't so happy, though: They had to collect all of those pennies, count them out and reroll them back up again for deposit. Time spent: three hours, reports the New York Daily News.
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Sanders is far from the first person to try paying a ticket with pennies in Frisco, Texas; in 2013 John Gately made a video of himself arguing with clerks over their unwillingness to accept pennies to pay a $127 ticket issued to his wife for not wearing her seat belt properly.
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Still, in case you're getting bright ideas about how to pay off all your bills, while the government is one thing, private businesses can refuse certain kinds of legal tender, according to the Treasury.
But back to Sanders, who did manage to get his common cents across. Though he did end up overpaying, to the tune of $7.81.
"I'm going to go ahead and let them keep that," he said.
