Hmm, you were wondering why someone beside law enforcement would want to write down the serial numbers of all their banknotes.
Well, here we've got several tens of thousands of people doing just that.
The reason is, with them written down, you can track the movements of your money. In most situations it can't be claimed to be extremely useful (of course in your situation it would have proved really useful, but that's of course very seldom), but it indeed is a lot of fun. When you get an email saying "your note was found in Greece", it really does feel quite cool. Especially if the included map shows the line sweeping all the way from Detroit to Athens :)
That's what we're all doing. There are currently slightly less than 100 000 of us, entering their notes' serial numbers to Eurobilltracker.
As a side effect this hobby gives you a rather good amount of nifty information over how money circulation works. And we've got some information that would probably prove useful for the central banks when they are ordering notes from different sources if they had it :)
And of course there's also the point that the community around this hobby is, for various reasons, very strong. Many of us travel yearly thousands of kilometers across Europe to meet each other in the international meetings. And then there the local meetings which seem to be taking place somewhere all the time.
And, for your information, there's a similar site for the US$, too. It's called Where's George and can be found through the web address
http://www.wheresgeorge.com . I think you should try it, it'll prove a lot of fun :)
But hey.. I wish the robbers still haven't had the time to change the money to dollars and you can stop them. 500€ notes aren't precisely the most common money out there. And I guess that if someone has changed several notes of 500€ at once, he can easily be found by asking from the currency exchanges and then viewing through the security camera tapes (unless they have mysteriously disappeared, like they usually do when they would work for your advance instead of against you..). Of course the currency exchange offices don't tell that information to anyone but the police, but I think they will be ready to help the police.
You've got the good position of precisely knowing the amount of stolen notes. Good luck!
