~$100,000 in dimes stolen from truck in Northeast Philadelphia - 6abc Philadelphia

Police are investigating after someone broke into a trailer containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of dimes in Northeast Philadelphia.

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Police are investigating after someone broke into a trailer containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of dimes in Northeast Philadelphia. The discovery was made around 6 a.m. Thursday in a Walmart parking lot on the 4300 block of Byberry Road. Police on the scene say an estimated one million dimes, worth $100,000, were stolen.

A total of $750,000 worth of dimes were in the truck, police said. Dimes were found scattered from the Walmart parking lot to Woodhaven Road. Action News has learned the truck driver picked up the dimes from the Philadelphia Mint on Wednesday, but then went home to get some sleep before a long drive to Florida. So, the truck driver parked the big rig in the Walmart parking lot.

When he came back Thursday morning he found the trailer door was open. "They were trying to cross-load the dimes into other things. There are dimes all over the parking lot," said Capt. Jack Ryan of Northeast Detectives. It's not known if the thief or thieves knew what was inside. Northeast Detectives say it's not unusual for thieves to break into trailers just to see what they can find.

There are cameras in the parking lot and investigators are working on a suspect description. Sources tell Action News that SWAT officers were called to the scene to help block entrances.

      • wopazoo [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        860 cubic meters felt wrong to me (it's way too much to fit in a box truck), so I calculated the actual volume of all the stolen dimes.

        A dime has a diameter of 17.91mm and a height of 1.35mm. The volume of a dime is: pi (17.91/2)^2 1.35 = ~340.11 mm^3.

        The robber stole 1 million times so the total volume of dimes would've been: 340.11 * 10^6 mm^3 = ~0.340 m^3 = ~340L.

        340L is a few car trunks' worth of volume, so it's still a comical sight seeing people scoop armfuls of dimes into car trunks.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The article first said $750k then they changed it to $100k. And now it's $200k. I wonder what it'll be tomorrow.

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah looks like 5000lbs per 100k USD, officially dimes weigh 2.268g and I've got a 0.05g accurate scale that just gave me 22.68g for 10 pretty fresh looking dimes.

      Apparently if we can one thing right, it's how much zinc we stamp...

      I am surprised it was that easy to steal, I saw coins being prepped for shipment at the Philly mint (largest in the world by the way) years ago and they were piling them in like bulletproof time-locked crates. Like a beefier version of how ballot boxes are often locked during transport. I guess that level of security got abandoned at some point, probably the shipping was contracted out somehow.