Redeem now - A family found 800,000 pennies in the basement of a deceased relative.
- Some rare pennies have sold for millions of dollars, and they hoped to find one in the huge pile.
- But they gave up after an hour and listed the whole lot for $25,000, multiple outlets reported.
After stumbling across a hoard of 800,000 pennies in the basement of an old family home, a couple set out to find a million-dollar penny — but gave up after an hour and listed the whole lot for $25,000, news outlets reported.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in.The needle-in-a-haystack search began when John Reyes and his wife were clearing out her old family home in Los Angeles, KTLA reported.
In a basement crawl space, they found an unusual trove that belonged to Reyes' father-in-law before his death: a stash of roughly 800,000 copper pennies.
The US reduced the copper content in its pennies in the 1980s, prompting Reyes' father-in-law to save the older coins, with the belief that they would appreciate in value, The Washington Post reported.
The stash was so vast that it took a whole day to remove it from the basement, the couple told KTLA.
Moving the haul to a second location also turned their pickup trucks into lowriders, Reyes told The Washington Post.
After making the discovery, Reyes contacted his nearest Wells Fargo Bank branch to see whether it would take the pennies, but the manager said there wasn't enough room in the vault.
Hearing of the size of the hoard, she said they should pore over the coins to see whether there was a treasure in their midst that collectors might pay top dollar for.
"You probably have a million-dollar penny in there," she told him, according to The Washington Post.
Indeed, some mint-condition Lincoln pennies from 1971 can be worth up to $1,000, while much-older rare pennies have gone for up to $1.7 million.
Doing some basic research, Reyes set out to find such a treasure, The Washington Post reported.
But the family gave up after an hour of looking through roughly 300 pennies, the paper said.
"We had no clue what we were looking for," Reyes said.
They're now pinning their hopes on a $25,000 sale of the whole lot, KTLA said, which is still roughly three times the coins' face value.
Reyes said he's talking to "a really serious buyer" who'd then have the tantalizing possibility of finding a treasure or two among the 800,000 coins.
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