I feel sorry for these folk, but they have brought this upon themselves by publically announcing their find. Both the state government and now the federal government have descended on them like a pack of ravenous wolves.

[i]Remember the California couple who found $10 million in gold coins on their property? They’re probably going to end up with NOTHING in the final analysis, as breaking news from San Francisco reveals that the source of the mystery gold has been discovered:

A story that describes a gold heist from the San Francisco Mint at the turn of the century could explain the source of the gold coins worth $10 million that were found last month in California’s Mother Lode country.

The published news item was discovered in the Haithi Trust Digital Library and was provided by Northern California fishing guide Jack Trout, who doubles as a historian and collector of rare coins.

The details of the 1899 heist — $30,000 face value of uncirculated gold coins stolen from the San Francisco Mint in 1899 — matches every known fact about the gold coins found recently in the Sierra foothills, which were nearly $30,000 in face value of uncirculated mint condition coins mostly made at the San Francisco Mint in the late 1800s.

If, as is almost certainly the case, this explains the origin of the found coins, then the couple who found them will not merely have to pay taxes on them — they’ll have to turn them over entirely back to the federal government, since the coins’ status has changed from “treasure trove” to “stolen goods”:[i]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/03/gol...-trove-shocker/ (emphasis in original)

Buried Gold Likely Not From Heist, Says US Mint Rep

(Newser) – Perhaps it was too intriguing to be true: A rep for the US Mint and an expert on the San Francisco Mint throw water on the latest theory surrounding the $10 million in gold coins uncovered in California—that they were the long-hidden spoils of a 1901 gold heist from the SF Mint. "We do not have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any United States Mint facility," Mint rep Adam Stump tells CNN, and that determination follows a good deal of research, he adds to the San Francisco Chronicle. "We've got a crack team of lawyers, and trust me, if this was US government property we’d be going after it." Richard Kelly, who wrote a book on the SF Mint, sees a further issue with the dates of the uncovered coins—they're stamped 1847 to 1894, and he thinks ones taken from the mint would be dated nearer to 1901. "We assume from the times and all the records that they were new coins [taken]. Back then, once coins were printed they flew out of the mint."

And a coin dealer tells the Los Angeles Times that each of the six bags of Double Eagles (that's a $20 coin) stolen would have held coins bearing the same date and mint mark. The buried coins feature "12 times as many permutations as we should have," he says. The Chronicle also takes a look at what one coin collector considers to be the smoking gun: an 1866 Double Eagle that had no "In God We Trust" motto on it; 1866 was the year that motto began gracing the coins, and Jack Trout told the paper that he believed the presence of the rare and valuable coin amid the buried haul signaled that it had to have come directly from the SF Mint. But the Chronicle turns to the Encyclopedia of US Gold Coins, which presents the coin as anything but one-of-a-kind: Per the encyclopedia, 120,000 "No Motto" Double Eagles were produced in San Francisco in 1866 before the changeover occurred. (Click for more on the heist theory.)

http://www.newser.com/story/183302/burie...s-mint-rep.html

Hey kids. This is the reason that if you find a treasure, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT and just sit on it. Telling people about it just gets you into all sorts of issues. Who cares if the govt' can't lay claim to it. They are going to take half of it through taxes anyway.

These gold owners are easily the stupidest people I have read about in a long time. It makes sense though. They are Californians.