When a car is taken to the scrapyard, what happens to those coins, you lost, under your car seat? They get turned into the U.S. Government for cash. Problem is that the U.S. thought it was being scammed by China.

Lost Coins Help Prop Up the Multibillion-Dollar Car Recycling Industry

Image: Shutterstock Your car isn't a piggy bank, but it's hard to tell from all the coins spilling over the edge of the cup holder. Don't worry though, you're not alone in your reckless abandonment of these annoying pieces of legal tender: There's so much loose change hiding in American cars that, cumulatively, our abandoned coins are a multimillion dollar revenue stream that helps prop up an entire industry.

 From article, (“The U.S. Mint gets a lot of value from the redemption of damaged coins,” Johnson, said referring to the Mint’s decision to reinstate the program. “It gets precious metals back so they may be used in new coins and protects the integrity of the U.S. coinage system by taking older coins out of circulation. 

Your car isn’t a piggy bank, but it’s hard to tell from all the coins spilling over the edge of the cup holder. Don’t worry though, you’re not alone in your reckless abandonment of these annoying pieces of legal tender: There’s so much loose change hiding in American cars that, cumulatively, our abandoned coins are a multimillion dollar revenue stream that helps prop up an entire industry.

Each year, millions of American cars, washing machines, vending machines, and other coin-operated devices are torn to bits and recycled, mostly in China and India. This process also results in the recovery of millions of dollars in coins that were hidden in these machines and mutilated during the recycling process.


Until 2015, recyclers could collect these mutilated coins and sell them back to the US Mint at a rate that equals their unmutilated value ($20 per pound for quarters and dimes, $1.81 for a pound of pennies, $4.53 for a pound of nickels). This redemption program provided an important source of income for the scrap-metal recycling industry, which was suddenly cut off in 2015 when the Mint abruptly halted the program. At the time, the Mint said it noticed a significant uptick in the number of coins being processed by its Mutilated Coin Redemption Program that had been sent from abroad, stoking fears that foreign recycling programs were defrauding the US Mint with counterfeit coins.

Things came to a head in 2014, when a US recycling company called Wealthy Max, whose recycling operation has an affiliate in China, was accused of passing off counterfeit coins to the US Mint. Indeed, one judge claimed that the prosecutors laid out “convincing evidence that rationally leads to the conclusion that most, if not all, mutilated coin imports from China were counterfeit for the past 15 years.”

This was no small accusation. Over the past two decades, Wealthy Max has redeemed nearly $40 million worth of mutilated coins from the US Mint. In 2014 and 2015, Wealthy Max shipped a total of $3.2 million worth of mutilated coins that were seized by the Department of Homeland Security on suspicion of being counterfeit, and the Mutilated Coin Redemption Plan was indefinitely suspended shortly thereafter.

Much of the “convincing evidence” put forth by the government was contested by Wealthy Max as being unfounded. For instance, the government claimed that Chinese companies have redeemed more half dollars in the last decade than have ever been produced, and a 2009 report found that every scrap car sent to China for processing in 2007 would have had to have contained $900 worth of coins to account for all the mutilated coins the Mint received from the country that year.

As it turned out, however, the government just didn’t understand how the global scrap recycling industry worked. As part of its lawsuit to recover the $3.2 million it was owed for its seized mutilated coins, Wealthy Max flew two executives from China to the US to explain how the Chinese recycling industry worked and to demonstrate its massive scope (China is the number one importer of US scrap metals). It even went so far as to open up 13 tons of mutilated coins for inspection by the public, but no government officials bothered to attend the event. Neither Wealthy Max, nor its legal representation, could be reached for comment.

The problem with the claim that more half dollars were redeemed than ever produced is that the government had no record of the number of half dollars redeemed through the coin mutilation program, making this allegation impossible to prove. Moreover, the reason why more coins were redeemed in 2007 than could possibly have been shipped in scrapped cars was that many of those coins were from previous scrap that had been stored in China for years before being shipped and were also recovered from other scrap sources (such as washing and vending machines), not just cars.)

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