Man finds £5.5 million in a storage unit he bought for just under £400

A lucky treasure hunter struck gold after he discovered a life-changing amount of money in an abandoned storage unit he bought for just under £400.

The lucky buyer had purchased the unit at an auction from Storage Wars auctioneer Dan Dotson – the popular US reality show where storage units that have been locked up and unpaid for at least three months go on sale to bidders, in the hope there is a fortune inside. As each buyer is unaware what’s inside until they have purchased the unit – they were left amazed at what he uncovered in a locked safe after they discovered the life-changing amount of money inside.

The cash was found in a safe in the abandoned

The original owner of the money contacted their attorney to get it back

He paid just $500 (£370) for the mystery unit and then found the safe inside. According to Dotson, the buyer first tried (and failed) to get the safe open.

“They called a second person, and when that person opened it up… inside the safe, they’re normally empty, but this time it wasn’t empty. It had $7.5million (£5.8m) cash inside,” he said in a video posted to Facebook.

The sheer amount of money left the auctioneer baffled, as he questioned: “$7.5 million inside of a unit, I don’t think you’d forget it, but maybe you were just in a position where somebody else was in charge of it, I don’t know?” Where the cash came from remains unclear, with Dotson suggesting it may simply have been abandoned.

Despite it being a life-changing amount for the new owner of the unit, it meant the original owner had just lost $7.5 million (£5.5 million). Dotson then further shared that as soon as the original owners of the unit found out that it had been sold with their cash still inside they quickly contacted their attorney to negotiate a deal with the new owner.

According to PEOPLE, the original owners had initially offered $600,000 to return the money, but then settled on a deal that saw the man return the money for a $1.2 million (£900,000) reward. While he didn’t keep the full amount, the man still came out with $1,499,500 (£1.1 milion) in profit on a $500 investment.

In the Facebook video, Dotson’s wife Laura said she doesn’t feel like it’s “clean money” while Dotson said he would have taken the $1.2 million reward, partially because he wouldn’t want to find out how far the former owners would go to get their money back. “I wouldn’t ask a damn thing,” he explained. “$7.5 million is a lot of money… but that’s a lot of running, too.”