US Mint: $10 million in coins may have been stolen

A California couple who found $10 million price of buried gold coins might not be so lucky in the end.

The couple found the perfect condition coins on their own property while hiking some time ago.

Turns out, the coins may have been stolen in the U.S. Mint in 1900, according the San Francisco Chronicle. That will make the coins property from the U.S. government.

“We don’t have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any Usa Mint facility,” Mint rep Adam Stump tells CNN, which determination follows a large amount of research, he increases the Bay area Chronicle.

“We’ve got a crack team of lawyers, and trust me, if the was U.S. government property we’d be going after it.” Richard Kelly, who wrote a book around the San Francisco Mint, sees an additional issue with the dates from the uncovered coins-they’re stamped 1847 to 1894, and that he thinks ones taken from the mint would be dated nearer to 1901.

“We assume in the times and all the records that they were new coins [taken]. In those days, once coins were printed they flew out of the mint.”

And a coin dealer tells the la Times that each from the six bags of Double Eagles (that’s a $20 coin) stolen might have held coins bearing the same date and mint mark. The buried coins feature “12 times as numerous permutations as we should have,” he says.

The Chronicle also analyzes what one coin collector considers to become the smoking gun: an 1866 Double Eagle which had no “In God We Trust” motto on it; 1866 was the entire year that motto began gracing the coins, and Jack Trout told the paper that he believed the existence of the rare and valuable coin amid the buried haul signaled it had to have come directly from the San Francisco Mint. But the Chronicle turns to the Encyclopedia of U.S. Gold Coins, which is definitely the coin as anything but one-of-a-kind: Per the encyclopedia, 120,000 “No Motto” Double Eagles were produced in Bay area in 1866 before the changeover occurred.