Lincoln Cent Possibly Smuggled Out By Some Mint Employee?

Agreed still very cool, still looking for one of these

A coin dealer friend of mine brought a few hundred examples of gross errors to Sydney from the 'States, several years ago, for his stock list.
Although I have never seen any since that time, and I really treasure the examples I have, I suspect that they are not that rare.

I suspect that such gross errors may have been secreted out of the Mint by some or other clandestine means.
My suspicion rests on the fact that such errors, mainly of hugely off center strikes, are so obvious that they should have been easily spotted by normal means, and under normal circumstances, should have never escaped from the Mint.

Perhaps someone else in the CCF may be able to come up with a better explanation than mine.

Billions of cents are minted every year; I doubt if every single one is eyeballed for quality control by a mint employee. Not worth the time. Even the sorting equipment probably only filters so much out before it goes into a bag and out of the building.

Anything is possible, but I'm thinking any riddling or sifting devices of the time would pass this coin easier than a plain or properly struck cent. The diameter of the unstruck portion of the planchet diameter, even though extended from off center strike, the majority or in one direction is less than 19mm. I'm thinking any sifter sized for cents would need to be slightly larger to allow normal 19mm sized struck coins through without clogging up the system.

If they ran every coin straight up and flush to or through a tube, might would be a different story. Thanks, Doug.

From what I understand, coins are chosen at random from batches to test for quality control. One-off errors like this are much more likely to sneak their way through into Mint bags (especially then) than, for example, an extreme die clash where every single coin in the batch shows the error.

I came across another very similar piece today.

Lucky Cuss, that's a very nice Off Center Strike!

My theory on these type of things was they could be found in mint sewn bags back in the day. They got through at the mint and shipped to the federal reserve banks. At this point though, they are shipped by the hundreds of thousands of coins in Ballistic Bags on metal pallets to armored carriers for rolling and distribution.

I happen to think that's how more of these have turned up in the last foew decades in pristine examples. The armored carriers are pulling the rejects from their machines and putting them on the market instead of them getting destroyed as defective along the way. Even the fed when they were doing the sorting and rolling would save them and return them to the mint as defective/damaged for destruction when they found them, but since the armored carriers took over distribution I think they play a good roll in how so many are now out there for sale.

Anyways, that's what I think is happening. The mint strikes billions and wouldn't care. The Fed would want the credit for the defective pennies and send them back. But the armored carriers I could see those employees making switch outs and taking the rolling machine rejects home to sell as mint error and supplement their income... as long as nothing is missing I don't think anyone would care.