What Do You Do With 2 Million Dimes?
The United States Mint ships billions of new coins to Federal Reserve Banks every year aboard armored cars and trucks. While demand has decreased, the U.S. Mint still issued over 11 billion coins in 2023; a whopping 2.7 billion of those coins were dimes. On April 13, 2023, four Philadelphia men found and stole over 2 million of those freshly minted dimes.
Dime Heist
A shipment containing 75 million dimes was on a tractor-trailer headed to Miami when the driver pulled into a Walmart parking lot in Philadelphia for the night. Four men on a crime spree — they'd already stolen frozen crab meat, shrimp, beer, and liquor from several tractor-trailers in the area — stopped on a dime when they saw the parked truck. They reportedly did not know what was inside this particular trailer when they broke in; they must have been shocked to find $750,000 worth of dimes stacked high on pallets.
A Parable of Lost Coins
The morning after the robbery, the driver returned to the truck to find the door open, and the parking lot littered with thousands of coins. Security footage showed a group of men, dressed in gray hoodies, and armed with bolt cutters, breaking into the truck and shuttling some of the cargo onto a waiting getaway truck. They took about $234,500 worth of dimes, in all.
What Do You Do With 2 Million Dimes?
In the days that followed, one suspect sent another a link to an online calculator estimating the value of the dimes based on their weight, and that suspect forwarded the link to the other two alleged robbers. The men converted a portion of the coins to cash at various Coinstar machines around Maryland and deposited some of the dimes into suburban Philadelphia banks before withdrawing them as cash, but they converted less than a couple thousand dimes into cash before they were caught. It was unclear in the court filings what happened to the millions of other stolen coins.
Rakeim Savage, Ronald Byrd, Haneef Palmer, and Malik Palmer face federal charges of conspiracy, robbery, and theft of government money. Instead of easy money, the men could be looking at hard time.
References: Dime heist: 4 Philadelphia men charged after millions of dimes stolen from US Mint truck | 4 facing federal charges for stealing 2 million dimes from truck in Philadelphia | Chunk of change: four charged with stealing millions of US dimes from truck | U.S. Mint Produces 11.38 Billion Coins for Circulation in 2023, Lowest Since 2012
