A 55-YEAR-old penny known as a 1969-S Doubled Die Obverse (DDO) Lincoln cent can be recognized by an extremely rare error – and one is going on sale.
The rare pennies have double-printed letters and there are only about a dozen of them left circling around, making the upcoming auction one to consider.
Double-printed letters “1969-S,” “Liberty” and “In God We Trust” are the double die error to look out for – the coin must also be from 1969.
The 1969-S Doubled Die Obverse (DDO) Lincoln cent will be auctioned at the US Coins Signature Auction in Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, from Wednesday through Sunday, January 10-14.
It is a rare event for one of the pennies to be auctioned.
As of Monday night, there were about 29,500 pre-registered phone bidders, according to Heritage Auctions website.
The highest bid is currently $30,000.
Due to its value, the penny is a hot commodity to own.
The 1969-S Doubled Die Obverse (DDO) Lincoln also has quite the story behind its history, adding to its high demand value.
The Professional Coin Grading Service believes there were fewer than 100 of the coins created.
In 1970, coin dealers Roy Gray and Mort Goodman created counterfeit copies of the coins using industrial equipment, Coin Week reported.
They sold 2,900 of them for $92,000 to a collector to distribute.
But after Gray and Goodman asked to have their coins put into circulation in the Washington D.C. area, the coin distribution turned the fake coins into the United States Secret Service.
The Secret Service did an investigation on Gray and Goodman which unveiled a larger counterfeiting scheme and they were sentenced to federal prison.
This led to many of the coins that turned up being confiscated due to the belief they were fakes.
That changed after a coin collector named Cecil Moorhouse came across one while at his local Bank of America in a roll of pennies from the San Francisco Federal Reserve.
The coin Moorhouse found was first confiscated, but was later confirmed to be genuine by the United States Mint and was eventually returned to him.
Another coin collector named Bill Hudson also found one independently around the same time.
