Man Buys Storage Unit for $500, Finds $7.5M Inside

If it sounds like something out of 'Storage Wars,' it almost is
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 24, 2018 6:30 AM CST

Sorry to burst your bubble, but whatever bargain you scored on Black Friday pales in comparison to the deal a man got when he purchased a storage unit in Southern California in October. It's a tale conveyed by Dan Dotson of A&E's Storage Wars, who was the one who actually sold the unit for $500 through his company American Auctioneers, and who learned what happened next when a woman came up to him at a Nov. 1 charity event. "She said, 'I just gotta tell you this story, my husband works for a guy that bought a unit from you and there was a safe in there,'" Dotson recounts to the Desert Sun. Inside the safe was cash—$7.5 million of it.

In a YouTube video in which he explains the story (the original auction wasn't recorded for A&E), he says that when the storage unit's original owners found out it had been sold they reached out to the new owners via a lawyer to make a deal to get their money back, making an initial offer of $600,000. They ended up letting the new owner keep $1.2 million. People does the simple math: that's $1,199,500 "in profit on a measly $500 investment." (Another couple recently made a million-dollar discovery.)

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