The man shared a photo of the unique coin to social media asking “Is this a rare find?”
The 2020 coin was minted to honour firefighters who fought Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer bushfires in 2019, depicting two firefighters with a flame between them.
In a rare minting error, known as a “bullseye error”, the flame that is meant to sit between the firefighters ends up printed on the other side of the coin, covering the face of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
According to Yahoo Finance, an uncirculated version of the coin had previously sold for $5950, although the one from the servo had likely been battered around in a till and will not fetch that much.
“If this guy has got it from the servo, it sounds like it’s probably been in a till, it may have been knocked around a bit and all those things contribute to a value,” Coin expert Matthew Thompson told Yahoo Finance.
Thompson went on to say that nobody knows for sure how many of the ‘bullseye error’ coin exist, and that it is “very uncommon” for the Royal Australian Mint to make mistakes, which only adds to coins value.
“No one knows for sure which is sort of why they’re so popular and collectable because the amount out there that’s available would be really small. But no one knows a definitive production run on them,” Thompson said.