A family in Pico-Union found one million pennies while cleaning a home. Mekahlo Medina reports for the NBC4 News on June 9, 2023.
While cleaning out their late father’s home in Los Angeles’ Pico-Union neighborhood, a family discovered about 1 million pennies in a crawl space.
The standard value for 1 million pennies is $10,000 dollars, but these are not standard pennies. The family believes that their father, a German immigrant, hoarded the coins after the U.S. switched from making pennies out of copper to using zinc during WWII.
“These have literally been untouched for decades, and I think that’s the super unique part about it,” said John Reyes, speaking about his late father-in-law’s pennies.
The family believes the man intended to profit off the value of the metal.
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They also think that one of those pennies could be a collector’s item and potentially worth millions. In 2010, a 1943 penny sold for a $1.7 million. Other rare pennies have been sold for thousands of dollars.
Factoring in these considerations, the family listed their collection of boxes, crates, and sacks of pennies on the OfferUp website at $25,000.
“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,” Reyes said.
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The family originally tried to take the pennies to the bank, but Reyes said that they were told that so many pennies would not fit in the bank’s vault.
Now, the family is looking for expert advice on how they should proceed.
“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,” Reyes said.
