Lincoln Cent Possibly Smuggled Out By Some Mint Employee?

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.