When a coin collector was told his mysterious $5 discovery was a fake by numerous experts, he began to believe it himself.
But he is now on course to becoming a millionaire, because it turns out the cynics and the experts who said it was a fraud couldn’t have been more wrong.
This is because the find is actually an incredibly rare coin from the California Gold Rush that is worth millions. It is thought that only a handful are still around today.
The San Francisco Mint produced fewer than 300 of the special edition $5 coins in 1854 at the height of the gold rush and it turns out there are now four of them left in the world.
Dealers told the anonymous owner that the coin was a forgery, so he took it to the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), the world’s largest rare coin authentication company.
After careful examination, NGC has revealed that the rare treasure is the real deal after it compared it to the three known coins.
“It’s like finding an original Picasso at a garage sale. It’s the discovery of a lifetime,” NGC chairman Mark Salzberg told PR Newswire.
“The owner of the coin is a lifelong New England resident who wants to remain anonymous. He was stunned when we informed him that it is a genuine, multimillion-dollar, rare coin.”
“He had shown it to a few collectors and dealers at a recent coin show, but everybody said they thought it was a fake because until now there were only three genuine surviving 1854 San Francisco Mint $5 gold pieces known.”
One of the known coins was stolen from the Du Pont family — one of the richest families in America — in 1967 and has never been recovered.
Gizmodo reports that, in October 1967, the chemical company heir Willis H. Du Pont and his family were tied up in their Coconut Grove, Florida mansion while masked gunmen ransacked the place.
The crooks took off with more than 7,000 rare coins, some of which have been found in odd places over the years. But Du Pont’s incredibly rare $5 piece from 1854, known as a Liberty Head Half Eagle in collecting circles, is still missing.
“We wanted to make sure that this wasn’t that coin, so we were able to obtain images from when it was previously auctioned in 1962,” NGC president Richard Montgomery told Gizmodo.
Once satisfied it wasn’t the stolen coin, NGC had to prove its authenticity, comparing it to the two other coins in existence, one of which is held by Washington’s Smithsonian Institution.
“We look for common things that you’ll see between the coins. You’ll see the four in the digit is slightly attenuated or not as high in relief as the regular part of the four. We noticed that was exactly the same as the Smithsonian piece,” Montgomery said.