Texas (USA) - Inheriting a trunk full of money sounds very tempting at first. But in this case, the devil is in the detail. Dave d'Agrella (28) from Texas received all the money in the form of one-cent coins from his late grandfather Donald Dayton. Now the grandson is facing several problems at once.

On the one hand, he has to laboriously count the money , and on the other, he has to check whether there are any collector's items among them that might be worth significantly more than just 1 cent.

In addition, d'Agrella has now discovered that the penny coins that came onto the market before 1982 are made of pure copper and are therefore worth three cents today.

Because his grandfather left him the pennies in two-liter bottles, it slowly becomes clear how much everything could be worth together. After counting out several of the bottles, d'Agrella can estimate that it must be worth around 3000 US dollars (about 2836 euros).

"At some point in the 1970s, he began to save every change he received and only sorted it by face value. After that, the coins went straight into two-liter bottles," the Texan explained in an interview with Newsweek.

However, d'Agrella only recently achieved his real breakthrough on Reddit. Some users there were able to help him.

The 28-year-old is particularly interested in the coins that are made of pure copper, i.e. from before 1982. Because there are definitely interested parties. "If I sort these pennies out, I could potentially sell them to these hoarders for almost three times their value. I posted the post on Reddit to see how viable that would actually be."

Since then, d'Agrella has learned that there are special machines that can check the material composition of pennies.

"My plan now is to run all the pennies through the machine, then go through them all further by hand and eventually find a way to get rid of the stuff I don't want to keep," says the heir.

In any case, he still has a lot of work ahead of him.