Found My First 1968 Kennedy In The Wild - Huge Pushback From Bank Clerk

I am currently working on base in South Korea and we have two American banks that provide services to us. One bank, Community Bank is run almost 100% by local Koreans and the other, Navy Federal Credit Union, is run mostly by spouses, dependents, and other US citizens.

I personally have used Community Bank for a while and its where I do my weekly, "Have you found anything cool?" visit. Normally, get some SBAs, old Korean bills, old US bills from the 70-90s. This time I visited and my clerk whipped out two Kennedy half dollars to give me.

Long story short, an older Korean clerk next to her grabbed it and claimed they couldn't give me but one. Obviously (and she told me at the end of the bout), she knew it was silver and didn't want to give it me. However, I told her that as the bank customer, I wanted the half dollars they had and that she should give it to me. I won and she gave it to me:


Here is where I want to draw it out and see if any of you have had this experience. She and a couple of other female clerks in this bank, know what years are silver. They keep them in separate slots in their register and refuse to give them up to customers like me who are collecting coins.

There was another instance when an older lady's husband passed and came in to cash out his commemoratives at face value. Yes... legitimately. The bank teller told her that there was no way she could accept that much silver at face value and worked a deal out with her on the side. The lady then turned around and offered them to me, as she didn't care for coin collecting. In comes rude Korean lady #2. She basically coin-blocked the entire endeavor and grabbed the coins from the bank teller and put them in her drawer.

So, here is what these Korean ladies are doing. They are swiping all the silver coins and expensive silver certificates that folks bring. They then turn around and switch it out with money of their own or sell them at FV to a "customer". Then all the stuff is gone the next week.

I know this was a long post but, this is some shady stuff. Has anyone experienced this?