Thieves may not have been counting on finding a mountain of change when they broke into a truck filled with $750,000 in dimes, but they still made off with a chunk of the cargo and left coins scattered around a Philadelphia parking lot, authorities said.
Authorities say the thieves apparently fled with at least $100,000. It's not yet known how they carted off the mounds of dimes.
The theft was reported around 6 a.m. Thursday. The tractor-trailer driver had picked up the dimes from the Philadelphia Mint on Wednesday, authorities said, and was planning to transport them to Florida on Thursday.
It's not clear how many people may have been involved in the theft or if they knew what the truck contained. Responding police officers found hundreds of dimes scattered all over the parking lot, and authorities were still trying to determine how much money was stolen.
The outbreak that began in early 2022 has been much less severe this year as fewer cases of the virus are being found among the wild birds that spread it, but there have still been more than 8 million birds killed this year to help control the spread of the disease.
Police say three young men of Palestinian descent who were attending a Thanksgiving holiday gathering were shot and injured near the University of Vermont campus.