it's been three years now since e-bay was first flooded with dealers advertising the "great opportunity" to invest in iraqi dinars, and they're still going strong! the advertising message they give now is still the same as it was back then, and people are still buying. here's a good one:


let's stop there and use the kuwait example. if you lived in the u.s. and bought one million kuwaiti dinars on ebay during the first gulf war @ .10 per dinar, you just spent $100,000. you have 50,000 individual banknotes in the 20 denomination pictured here:



that's a lot of banknotes! anyway, fast-forward to august 1, 2004 like the advertisement says. the kuwait dinar is now worth $3.39 instead of ten cents. doing the math, you quickly realize your million dinars is now worth $3.4 million! a dream come true! imagine your surprise when you bring your massive haul down to the bank and find out that your notes aren't acceptable. they're worthless. the dinars you hoarded as an investment back in 1991 ended up having an exchange rate of zero in 2004.

and thats with kuwaiti dinars, which are widely accepted by major foreign exchange services. so why are people buying bricks of iraqi dinars? there isn't a single bank or airport kiosk in the united states that would exchange iraqi dinars for u.s. dollars. if the time ever comes where a dinar exchange is necessary, people would need to fly into baghdad to exchange them at the central bank. i really can't imagine waves of american 'tourists' coming into baghdad with crates full of cash.

if you bought dinar in 2004 and want to cash out now to cut your losses, (a million dinars sold for more money back when the market was hotter), the only place you could do it is on e-bay. hmmm...maybe i just answered my own question on why e-bay was still flooded with sellers. but people are still buying! oh well. i guess the lure to get rich quickly and easily is too strong. caveat emptor!

the only people making money off of iraqi dinars are the people who are actually here that can buy them at face value, then resell them at inflated prices to eager "investors". unless you're planning on boarding a plane to baghdad with suitcases full of cash, don't waste your time or money.

Great point.

I have a few Iraqi Dinars. All of them are individual ones for my collection.

I dont see the purpouse of buying stacks of them to trade in at a future time.... They will be just as worthless then as they are now....

It all goes back to the old saying. If it's to good to be true...


I do plan to try getting one each of the Iraqi notes for my collection at some point, but that's it.

Weren't the old Kuwaiti Dinars demonetized because the Iraqis had so many of them?

That's one of the things i don't like about eBays search. When i am looking at world banknotes, i wish i could have a way to remove all the Iraq listings. It would be a help not to have to skip over about 10 listings a page.

Ahhh, there is a solution, when you do your searches, in the search field enter this

-iraq* This will eliminate anything Iraq, Iraqi etc. This is a boolean search string, the - eliminates this string, and the * acts as a wildcard character to replace any subsequent character.

I do this a lot because of nonsensical George Best in Irish notes, and Jack Nicklaus in Scottish banknotes.

The Iraqi kingdom notes or at least the early republic notes are a more worthwhile pursuit, I think. But of course their prices has risen a lot . Perhaps the best would be to guess the next country that will be in a hotspot and buy their notes (Iran?) .

Good guessing...

These new Dinar notes might make a nice Christmas note for me this year. Hmmmm!

I have all the saddam notes and a few coins with saddams mug on them...I also have some the new dinar bill (2), not to invest but just because they were cheap and I wanted a set.



I have to say though..I bought some of the new coins...they suck...so plain and ugly:

In the search box under world paper money i typed in the following -iraq*

I tried what you typed and it pulled up just the iraq listings.....which I don't want.

Talking of mass selling of notes, there are quite a few Zimbabwean Bearers Cheques that are for sale on ebay, but none of them state that they expire at the end of July 2007

Hmm Worked for me. Make sure there is no space between the dash and Iraq* (-iraq* and not - iraq*) I tried putting a space and then I got all the Iraq notes too.

Type in what you want to search for, for me it is Czechoslovakian notes:

Czech* -iraq*

Otherwise you are searching for Iraq instead of eliminating it.

Normally I never reference one country for a search, i just wish i could remove all the iraq listings so i don't have to see them.

yeah, me too. i like to browse and wish i could remove all the iraq listings. that's when they bother me most...when i'm browsing. there's so many of them, and i find most of their headlines to be obnoxious and annoying. they don't bother me when i search for particular countries. i usually enter the country name, and then sort by highest first. that way i see the more interesting stuff first. this method doesn't work with iraq, of course.


thanks for the boolean tip though, i never tried that on ebay. i'll keep that in mind next time one of my searches is spammed with a lot of junk/annoying notes.

i've got some tarist bancnote from nicolai 2. around 3000 roubles. do you think that the state bank of russia will do what the banknot say" exchange for gold coin". it thing i'll get som kilo.

I think you would have a better chance of getting Putin to admit to his desire to stay President of Russia beyond 2008 than BoR redeeming these for gold.