A family made a lucky discovery of a million pennies when clearing out their late father’s home and it could be worth millions. They discovered the massive haul of coins in a crawl space in the home of the man who was an immigrant from Germany.
The family, who live in Los Angeles, think that he started to collect the coins after the USA changed from making pennies out of copper to instead using zinc during World War Two.
They believe he may have been gathering them as he hoped to make a profit out of the value of the metal.
The man’s son-in-law, John Reyes, told NBC LA: “These have literally been untouched for decades, and I think that’s the super unique part about it.”
They don’t know the exact value of the find yet but think that the pennies could be of interest to collectors.
This means that they possibly could be worth millions.
The Independent reports that an American penny from 1943 was sold for £1.35million in 2010 and other rare pennies have been sold for thousands.
The family first listed the pennies, which are stored in boxes, sacks, and crates, on the American local selling site OfferUp for $25,000 – more than double their value of $10,000.
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But now, with the possibility that the coins could be worth a lot more, they are going to take expert advice.
Mr Reyes said: “We started going through the arduous process of looking at the pennies and that quickly turned into, ‘We don’t know what we are doing.’
“And then we decided to pop open a couple of beers and have those instead.”
When they first tried to deposit the coins at a bank, they were told the vault wasn’t big enough to hold so many coins.
Mr Reyes added: “I’ve had quite a few collectors tell me that this is something that should not be sold until we know what’s going on.”
The real estate agent and his wife discovered the coins while they were getting the house ready to be renovated.
He told KABC: “Many of these bags are actually sealed, they’re lead sealed directly from the bank.
“As we start looking through we see some of the big banks, like Bank of America, and at the same time, we also saw banks that we have never even heard of, maybe banks that don’t even exist anymore.
“So we were just like ‘Wow this is amazing.’”
