It might just be worth checking the loose change in your pocket to see if you could be in possession of a coin worth tens of thousands of pounds.
Spare change can often come in handy when getting a trolley at a supermarket or wanting to lock valuables away in a locker at the gym but according to a coin expert on TikTok, somebody in the UK could be walking around with loose change worth significantly more than they realise.
In a video posted to his more than 200,000 followers, @CoinCollectingWizard has described an extremely rare coin set to be auctioned off on November 19.
Describing the coin, the expert shows the reverse which features a figure of Britannia, widely considered the female personification of Great Britain.
Surrounded by a beaded border, the figure rests her hand on a shield with the crosses of the Union Jack with a lighthouse, and a wavey sea can be seen in the background.
On the flip side, is a bust of a young Queen Elizabeth II facing right.
Around the edges of the coin are the words “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen, Defender of the Faith.”
@CoinCollectingWizard says: “And this just happens to be a 1954 penny, the rarest penny the rarest penny ever known, even rarer than the 1933 penny.
“As you may know the 1933 penny recently sold at auction for over £100,000.
“And now that a 1954 has appeared at an online auction, we know have an estimate for this coin between £90,000 and £100,000.”
The coin, which is said to have an estimated value of £90,000, could generate significantly more than that sum when it goes under the hammer.
Prior to the young Queen’s Coronation, over 1.3 million coins were believed to have been printed for “experimental” purposes but were supposed to have been destroyed and never made it to release.
At least one penny was known to have survived, but it cannot be ruled out that there are more in circulation, potentially masquerading as a regular one penny.
Vintage coin experts Online Coin Club said: “In response to a Freedom of Information request in 2011, the mint stated it was ‘unable to say for certain that only one survived from the trial run of several hundreds,'” stoking the possibility that there could be more waiting to be found.
