Patent ID: 8251197

Claim:
A banknote deposit machine, comprising: an inlet unit in which banknotes are deposited; an identifying unit classifying received banknotes into four categories of authenticated notes, counterfeit notes, unidentifiable notes, and rejected notes; a temporary money holder for temporarily storing therein the banknotes classified as authenticated notes, counterfeit notes, and unidentified notes by the identifying unit; and a plurality of storage cells provided inside the machine, respectively, for storing the banknotes which have been temporarily stored in the temporary money holder, wherein the counterfeit and unidentified notes temporarily stored in the temporary money holder are stored in predetermined storage cells of the plurality of the storage cells, the authenticated notes temporarily stored in the temporary money holder are stored in any of the plurality of the storage cells other than the predetermined storage cells for the counterfeit and unidentified notes, and in response to an instruction to return the deposited banknotes, the authenticated notes temporarily stored in the temporary money holder are returned to a user, and the counterfeit and the unidentified notes temporarily stored in the temporary money holder are stored in predetermined storage cells of the plurality of the storage cells.