Coinstar Machines

I had no idea you could search these machines. It is ironic that I were to see this post because just yesterday I looked at the coinstar machine in my bank and thought to myself... I wonder how many valuable coins are put in that thing for just face value. Oh the Horror!! How do you search their contents?

Coin Guy, the machines contents are usually only seen by employees. What is searchable is the reject slot on the machine. I used to work for a bank and would find all kinds of amazing things stuck inside the coin machines and left in the reject slots. I used to find anything from a broadstrike nickel to a 1842 large cent. Literally anything imaginable gets stuck in the machines. At least half my collection of silver dimes and quarters have come from various different coin machine rejects. I think I recall someone last year finding a silver 3 cent piece in a coin star reject bin...
-XoG

I check them for silver and other interesting rejects, but I would never actually use one of the machines. Pay 8% of my money to get bills? Yeah right!!

"I wonder how many valuable coins are put in that thing for just face value. Oh the Horror!"

I deliver pizzas and had a kid ask me one time if they could pay in rolls of quarters, I agreed, gave me four rolls, got to the store, all silver.
Some people just dont know. I bet his parents were mad when the got home. Best tip I ever got.

Ever since I started collecting I can't help but look at EVERY coin I find. It's like a habit now. If I am gettin change at the gas station, I will stand there, still at the counter, and look at the change before I can leave. But at least this habit doesn't give ya cancer. Just occasional high blood pressure :)

i have gotten silver out of the reject tray

I went thru 60,000 Cdn nickels in 2008, looking for the pre-1982 .999 nickel coins, which were worth .15-.20 each at the peak. Out of the 60,000 I pulled USD80.00 worth of US nickels, which I packed into my luggage on a family trip to Florida in December. Local banks refused to turn them into bills, but I was directed to the nearest Coinstar in a grocery. I started dumping rolls of nickels into the machine and WHAM! it jammed up after 2-3 rolls. Trust me, these were 100% good US nickels, no Cdn or foreign slugs.

The customer service lady was up to her eyeballs and too busy to help clear the machine. She seemed quite upset that the machine had jammed or that my request to help was completely unfounded. Finally she came over, put in a key, opened the lid and poked and prodded for a while but cold not find any jammed coins. She slammed the lid down and restarted the machine and a few foreign coins dropped out (and she gave me quite a glare), but it would not restart counting nickels. After repeating the same steps, with yet more foreign coins coming out, she asked me to return later, with no apologies. Seems people who have visited Latin American countries regularly bring back some pocket change and try their luck in the Coinstar. Small, aluminum 5 centavo coins cause havoc with the delicate mechanisms inside.

Anyway after a day at Disney spent buying ice cream and souvenirs with rolls of nickels, we returned to our Coinstar and found it had been cleared and reset. We managed to get all our nickels into the machine smoothly this time, but it kept spitting foreign coins into the reject tray. It seems to line-up the rejects and spits out the oldest ones each time it senses a "new" reject. Some of my US nickels might have been slightly bent or covered in paint, but these never came out of the machine...I ended up with about 6 foreign coins, mostly worth less than a nickel. No silver.

Conclusion: it might be possible to out-smart these machines. If people are dumb enough to dump silver coins into a Coinstar, they won't necessarily see them returned since the machine lines up the rejects. I'm guessing it holds maybe 6-12 rejects and processes them "last-in, last-out".

So one needs to "load" it with 6-12 coins it considers to be rejects without actually jamming the equipment, which can lead to nasty verbal and physical(!) attacks from irate store employees. After a few rejects, Coinstar should stop spitting out foreign oddities and, one might hope, deliver the silver coins from the above-mentioned dummies. I do not recommend dumping in a handful of slugs or worthless change from your last trip to the DR, this achieves nothing.

What coin would work? In the US I suppose Coinstar rejects pure .999 Ni Cdn nickels because this alloy was never used in coins of that size in the US. In Canada we've had nickels made of pure nickel, cupro-nickel and nickel plated steel, so US nickels would probably NOT be rejected here (Cdn and US coin diameters are generally the same in each denomination) as the size and magnetic image would be taken as the same as Cdn nickels from 1982-2000 and therefore acceptable. US and Cdn cents also share similar size and alloys.

Any ideas on this?

Since this poll, I have at least looked into the coin return of the coinstar.
This is actually quite a feat for me.
Considering that I very rarely give that machine a second glance. It seems that my dislike of giving 10% of my money away to one of those machines just isn't my thing.
My bank, however, has a coin machine that is free to account holders.