Stories like this break my numismatic heart:

Utah bank officials and police would like to know who the mysterious woman is who walked into a bank with a fistful of gold coins and exchanged them for only a couple hundred dollars. The coins, some more than a century old, are worth at least 50 times that much.

It happened last week at a St. George-area branch of Zions Bank. … [The woman] told the teller she had groceries waiting but the nearby Wal-Mart wouldn’t accept her coins. The teller gave her face value, 20 bucks a piece, for 14 coins.

“At the bank, we don’t deal with anything other than face value, and so she was just asking us to exchange the coins for dollars,” Brough said. …

All 14 are Double Eagles, $20 gold pieces. … Melted down at today’s gold prices, each coin is worth, minimum, $900. Some very rare Double Eagles are worth tens of thousands, even millions. The 14 coins have not been appraised.

My biggest fear as a coin collector whose memory gets worse by the year is that I’ll go senile one day and do something similar. I don’t have a cache of expensive coins, let alone gold ones, but the ones I do have are worth more than face value.

The customer clearly didn’t know the value of her gold coins, but it’s a shame that the teller didn’t know, either. The bank needs to give its tellers a basic education in coin history so they can steer future customers to the nearest coin dealer if they are about to trade rare coins at face value.

I hope they find this woman and return her gold coins.