Originally Posted by
bealine
It goes, through Travelex, to the charity "Comic Relief" which does all sorts of excellent work to help stamp out world poverty.
That's part of the story. The rest of the story is: Travelex sells them to my neighbour who sells certain currencies to me, and other currencies to other people. We then fly them back to their countries of origin and pay them into our bank accounts. I think in the end Comic Relief gets about 25-50% of the value, less for things like US pennies and more for things like JPY 500 and CHF 5.