They found a million copper pennies in the basement

Approximately one million one-cent coins were discovered by John Reyes when he and his wife were cleaning out her father's house in Los Angeles. The treasure was hidden in bank bags. Reyes is offering the coins through a sales app for $25,000, roughly three times face value.

Reyes, who is a real estate agent, first found the roll of coins in the basement. Clearing out the property wasn't easy because his father-in-law, Fritz, lived in the house with his brother, who had only recently moved out, but both were apparently thrifty and didn't like to get rid of things. And so the house was full of old "stuff".

Reyes, his wife and her two siblings returned to the house for about a year before they were able to clear everything out. There was stuff from the last half-century. Bags full of coins lay in a narrow space in the basement. It was the cellar that everyone had avoided for a long time. It was the last room in the house that needed to be cleaned out.

The cellar was full of cobwebs and dust. Moreover, the only way to get there was via rickety stairs, which of course no one wanted to go down. The bags were hidden under a large rolled-up heavy carpet. "It seems to me that my father-in-law put it there on purpose so that someone wouldn't find the coins easily," thinks Reyes (41).

Fritz began hoarding copper coins after 1982, when copper prices skyrocketed. The U.S. Mint responded by changing the production of the cents. Until then, they were produced at a ratio of 95 percent copper and the rest zinc. After 1982, they were mostly zinc.

At first, the discovery of the coins was more of a "Danai gift." They didn't know what to do with the copper coins. Reyes contacted the nearest Wells Fargo Bank branch. But they refused to store the coins because they said they didn't have enough room in their vault. So Reyes turned to a branch near his home in Ontario, California. At first they laughed at him, but when they found out how many coins were involved, they laughed.

"I remember it very well. They were staring at me with their mouths open, not wanting to believe that we had found a million copper coins in the basement," Reyes smiled.

By weighing them, they found the coins to be something in the neighborhood of one million. The family had to load the bags into two cars. All the banks contacted eventually refused to store them in the vault. They claim they just don't have enough room in the vault. Reyes and his family decided to sell the coins through a sales app. For $25,000. The collection may contain rare coins, but no one has examined it in detail.

Sources: www.washingtonpost.com, www.insider.com