How to Tell if a Collector has Gone Through Your Roll of Coins

There is no perfect absolutely certain way to know if a collector has gone through the roll of coins you are about to go through. But there are signs. If the wrapper has an "X" on it or somebody's initials, that is a potential sign.



To me, the biggest sign is this- all the coins are facing the same direction (all head or all tails). Let's consider rolls of Kennedy half dollars. There are only 20 coins in a roll, yet the odds of them all randomly facing the same direction is LESS THAN 1 IN 500,000 (1/2 x 1/2 x (18 more times)). So you can pretty much be assured that all facing the same direction means that someone is at least looking at the dates.

The exception within half dollars is the 1976 Bicentennial half. This is the only one that looked like it did. So, even if you see the reverse side without the date, you still know it is a 1976 (due to the different design). Let's say that you have a roll of 20 halves and 2 are 1976's (which face the other direction from the other 18 coins). Even the odds of 18 facing the same direction are well less than 1 in 100,000. So I would assume that the roll in question has been gone through by a collector.

The odds of a penny roll having all 50 coins facing the same direction is simply staggering. It would truly be up there with wacky stuff like being struck twice by lightning.

Any other signs people can think of indicating that a roll of coins has been gone through by a collector/hoarder?

Interesting line of thought. I collect coins and this had never occurred to me. My thought would be that they were wrapped by a person with an OCD (although, disorder is a bit of an oxymoron for a disorder that is symptomized by the compulsion to keep things orderly... But I digress). It would seem to me that someone who searches a roll of coins, once searched, would just grab them by the handful to put them into the roll. Larger coins like halves and dollars may be exceptional, but I cannot imagine trying to make sure all the pennies or dimes face the same direction.

Please don't take this as a criticism, I am just trying to go down the line of thinking.

It's not exactly the same thing but i've been doing a fair amount of cash handling on the job over the last couple of months. It all goes back to how i was trained to do things 30 + years ago.

All of the bills are oriented heads up and face up. If someone hands me a bunch of coins they get counted and dropped into a roll heads up. This seems to be common practice among the most of the cash handlers that i've worked with. Keeping things orderly reduces the chance of making a cash handling mistake.

One of the gals i worked with made the comment " I like my men face up".

Basically , nobody wants to come up short at the end of their shift. It makes you look like a thief.

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Not quite sure about the statistics and odds of them being all heads up in a penny roll. How on earth would one ever calculate that ? The problem is that there's a 50/50 chance that the coin will land heads up when you randomly drop the first coin in. It's the same chance when you drop the second coin in.

The problem is that they're two separate events so you can't add or multiply the odds.

I'm off to have a drink now.

Thanks a lot Hills.

Now my head hurts an I'm thirsty!

(An it gives me a good excuse to have a drink)

There's a 50/50 chance I'll get up an grab another one shortly.

Sirscrapalot - Hang with a cooler, it'll make you...cool.

Lol .... totally agree Bro. !

There are far better things to be doing with your time than calculating the odds.

What about the simple pleasures in life like enjoying a cold one in the shade of a tree on a hot summer day ?

I read a story on the internet about a guy ( who was about to get charged for doing this..) who in first person told his story of sorting Copper coins (Penny's?) & removing the ones that were worth more than face value, as scrap Copper.
He started it as a passtime, sorting by hand. Then a sideline, by buying bags of coins & using a coin sorter.
Then full time, getting a 2nd hand Bank coin sorter & getting coins by the pallet load from the Banks.

Then he was offered a even better coin sorter by the bank (who must have known what he was doing = Federal Illegal..)
Each time he was putting all of his profits into a better coin sorter.
Then things went weird, he knew the averages of coin types, but it was as if the Bank was presorting the coins & his average went down..
Then his machine went bad, he needed a Tech to fix it, who told him it was purposely 'detuned' & then by accident gave him the passcode into the machine.
He then fine tuned it, to the point it was even separating different coin 'runs' of manufacture. Let alone just the good coins.
By then he found some not so valuable coins would still return a profit, because of fine tuning.

Then things went 'Bad'. He found out he was being investigated for doing this.
And the bank, who he was buying coins of by the pallet load, by weight.... Short changed him. Lol.
Because the coins he was sending back were lighter, they calculate on a average weight, so they calculated that there was less coins in his return loads to the bank.
He had a tough time correcting them without actually admitting what he was doing (Illegal!!) Untill he got a analogue coin counter to sort it out finally.
Then he finds out the bank had just bought a super duper coin sorter & he realises they are sorting the more valuable coins out &. selling him the coins they couldn't sort because of time, and that they had only sold him his machine so they could upgrade their machine..
Then, he got busted. His assets seized,. & told he was going to be charged, I think he had hidden the machine by then & that had slowed them down a bit, no actual evidence.

Has anybody read this story or hopefully got a link to it? Pretty **** epic story.

Originally Posted by t00nces2

Interesting line of thought. I collect coins and this had never occurred to me. My thought would be that they were wrapped by a person with an OCD (although, disorder is a bit of an oxymoron for a disorder that is symptomized by the compulsion to keep things orderly... But I digress). It would seem to me that someone who searches a roll of coins, once searched, would just grab them by the handful to put them into the roll. Larger coins like halves and dollars may be exceptional, but I cannot imagine trying to make sure all the pennies or dimes face the same direction.

Please don't take this as a criticism, I am just trying to go down the line of thinking.

Think about it this way. When I look at coins, I am always looking at the date on the front. When done, I just set the coin down face up. I don't turn it over. When quickly scooping a bunch of coins to put into a coin tube, odds are that the vast majority (but not all- you might drop one or two, for instance) will all face the same direction when you stuff them into the tube.

Originally Posted by hills

Not quite sure about the statistics and odds of them being all heads up in a penny roll. How on earth would one ever calculate that ? The problem is that there's a 50/50 chance that the coin will land heads up when you randomly drop the first coin in. It's the same chance when you drop the second coin in.

The problem is that they're two separate events so you can't add or multiply the odds.

It is actually quite simple to calculate the odds. The odds of two coins facing the same direction is 1 in 2. You can have heads/heads or tails/tails. You could also have heads/tails or tails/heads.

3 coins- 1 in 4
4 coins- 1 in 8
5 coins- 1 in 16

You keep doubling the number and it will get to be a pretty staggering number in a short while.

This is like the old story where someone says that if you give someone a penny and double it each day for 30 days that you will have over a million dollars in a month.

The tricky part about this exercise is in considering extraneous items that might skew the results. Someone in this thread mentioned dealing with someone with obsessive/compulsive disorder, for instance.

Originally Posted by hills

There are far better things to be doing with your time than calculating the odds.

I would like to throw this out. If I saw two batches of coin rolls priced the same and could only afford to buy one, I'd be much more inclined to go with the ones that appear to be totally random rather than all facing the same direction. I've looked through well over a million coins over the years and SELDOM find good rolls that all or almost all face the same direction. I still go through them from time to time, but frankly it can be a waste of time when I consider the true value of my time. To put it in scrapping terms, it is almost like stripping wire and getting zero or even less than zero for your added effort.

Originally Posted by recyclersteve

It is actually quite simple to calculate the odds. The odds of two coins facing the same direction is 1 in 2. You can have heads/heads or tails/tails. You could also have heads/tails or tails/heads.

3 coins- 1 in 4
4 coins- 1 in 8
5 coins- 1 in 16

You keep doubling the number and it will get to be a pretty staggering number in a short while.

This is like the old story where someone says that if you give someone a penny and double it each day for 30 days that you will have over a million dollars in a month.

The tricky part about this exercise is in considering extraneous items that might skew the results. Someone in this thread mentioned dealing with someone with obsessive/compulsive disorder, for instance.

I was pretty clear. You can't calculate the odds that way.

It's been ages ...but if i remember correctly ... they used the example of a coin toss in college stats class to demonstrate the flaw in the reasoning.

Let's look at in a different way.

Get fifty pennies from a roll. Shake em' in a bag. Blindly draw one out and do a random coin toss. There's a 50/50 chance it will land heads up.

Do the same for the remaining 49 and keep track of the results.

Odds are that 25 of them will land heads up and will 25 will land tails up.

There will be some random variation, but with a large enough sample, the variations will average out and you'll hit that exact 50/50 ratio.

Try it for yourself.

The same basic principle should apply to coins randomly tossed into a coin roll. If you're not seeing that 50/50 ratio then there must be some other variable in the mix that's influencing the outcome.

I'm not disagreeing that somebody might have already culled the roll before you got to it. That's one possible explanation among many possible explanations. Truth be told .... you're most likely right on that call if you've been through millions of coins over the years. Experience is a good teacher. You probably know your stuff.

Correctly calculating the odds to a staggering number ? Hummmm ... well ... maybe not so much ?

Don't know about you but i'll happily leave that task to a guy with a PHD in statistical analysis. He could get a federal government grant and spend years of his life researching the penny roll problem.

Originally Posted by hills

I was pretty clear. You can't calculate the odds that way.

It's been ages ...but if i remember correctly ... they used the example of a coin toss in college stats class to demonstrate the flaw in the reasoning.

Let's look at in a different way.

Get fifty pennies from a roll. Shake em' in a bag. Blindly draw one out and do a random coin toss. There's a 50/50 chance it will land heads up.

Do the same for the remaining 49 and keep track of the results.

Odds are that 25 of them will land heads up and will 25 will land tails up.

There will be some random variation, but with a large enough sample, the variations will average out and you'll hit that exact 50/50 ratio.

Try it for yourself.

The same basic principle should apply to coins randomly tossed into a coin roll. If you're not seeing that 50/50 ratio then there must be some other variable in the mix that's influencing the outcome.

I'm not disagreeing that somebody might have already culled the roll before you got to it. That's one possible explanation among many possible explanations. Truth be told .... you're most likely right on that call if you've been through millions of coins over the years. Experience is a good teacher. You probably know your stuff.

Correctly calculating the odds to a staggering number ? Hummmm ... well ... maybe not so much ?

Don't know about you but i'll happily leave that task to a guy with a PHD in statistical analysis. He could get a federal government grant and spend years of his life researching the penny roll problem.

I agree that with truly random rolls the vast majority should have, say, 23-27 coins pointed up/down. Although I was/am very good with math and certain parts of probabilities, it has been decades since my formal education. I will therefore defer to any formal mathematicians in the bunch. That said, I stand by my original comment (whatever the odds) that if all or almost all coins in a roll face the same direction (heads or tails), then there is an overwhelming chance that the coins have been gone through by a collector.

Truthfully, I didn't think about bank tellers (and I was one back in the day) facing their coins in the same direction. I do remember being taught to face bills in the same direction, however.

I'm thankful that i don't have to deal with a lot of coin on the job. The main problem that i'm running into these days is that they've changed the coinage a bit. The nickels and quarters can be a bit hard to distinguish from one another when you're in a rush. It's easy to make a cash handling mistake.

It was a lot easier 40 years ago. The only variations that you had to sort through were the silver bearing coins and they stuck out like a sore thumb. If you had that particular " ring " in your drawer you knew there was a keeper mixed in there somewhere.

Anyway ... yeah ...the quarters and nickels go heads up when i'm making a roll. It's a Washington in one pile and a Jefferson in the other. I can't go by the tails side because of the fifty states thing with the quarters.

It's a good day when you hit it right on the penny when you cash up at the end of your shift. It's a bad day when your cash is off. Too many bad days ... you're apt to lose your job.

I would imagine that the standards of accuracy must be even stricter when you're working at a bank.

For whatever it's worth ... all the coin we get from the bank is machine counted and comes in a tight plastic roll.

I work outdoors, but the cashiers inside don't even need to count the coins in a roll anymore. They have a machine that weighs them up.If a customer hands them a hand roll that's done in paper ... they can tell in an instant if the count is off.

Originally Posted by hills

If you had that particular " ring " in your drawer you knew there was a keeper mixed in there somewhere.

This reminds me of something- I like looking through half dollar rolls. One day when my daughter was about 8-9 years old we were driving around. I heard her crack open a roll of halves and heard that beautiful silver sound. I said, "Hey, it seems like you have some silver there." She replied, "Dad, keep your eyes on the road!" Well, they were on the road. She didn't know I could tell merely by hearing that silver sound. Great memories from the past.

I will pick up rolls from time to time and sort out pre 1981 pennies. I am keeping them for the day that the penny is eliminated and they will be worth it. Those do not include indian heads/wheat pennies. I also keep the silver coinage separate as well.