Man finds £5.8m inside storage unit he bought for £390

Buyer hired locksmith to crack open mystery safe, says TV auctioneer

A man has found a whopping £5.8m hidden in a safe inside a storage unit he purchased from a TV auctioneer for just £390.

Dan Dotson, who owns American Auctioneers and stars on reality show Storage Wars, said a woman approached him at a charity auction in California to tell him the story.

In a Facebook video, he claimed the woman told him: “My husband works for a guy and he bought a unit from you for $500 (£390) and it had a safe in it.”

The unnamed man is then said to have got a locksmith to open the safe, according to the account Mr Dotson gave to US website Blast.

“The first person that they called to open the safe could not or did not,” said the TV auctioneer.

Mr Dotson said the buyer of the storage unit then called a second person who did manage to open it up.

The expert dealer explained that safes found in storage units are generally empty, but added: “This time it was not empty it had $7.5m cash inside the safe”.

According to Mr Dotson, the woman said a lawyer representing the original owners of the storage unit then contacted the buyer.

They offered the man £465,000 ($600,000). He initially rejected it before finally managing to settle on a reward of £930,000 ($1.2m).

The man, whose identity and whereabouts have not been identified, handed back both the safe and the rest of the cash, but pocketed his substantial reward money.

Mr Dotson and his wife Laura discussed what they would have done if they been the ones to find the hefty sum.

“I don’t feel like it would be clean money,” Ms Dotson said in the couple’s Facebook video.

The TV star said he would also have accepted the £930,000 reward – partly because he would not be keen to discover what the former owners might do to retrieve their money.

“I would not ask a damn thing,” he said. “$7.5 million is a lot of money… but that’s a lot of running too.”