BRADLEY SPRINGATE could be in the money after taking a double look at a seemingly ordinary 20p piece he was about to hand over in a shop.

The 23-year-old had only just been reading about the Royal Mint blunder, which has seen up to 200,000 20p pieces sent out without a year of issue mark.

Collectors have been scrambling to buy one of the coins after the error emerged last week.

One lucky person has already sold one on the Internet auction site eBay for £7,100.

And although the price has dropped, with thousands of people flooding the market, Mr Springate is hoping he will be able to turn the lucky find from his small change into at least a few hundred pounds.

Mr Springate does not know how the coin came into his possession and he was about to buy something in the One Stop shop he manages in Horse Fair, Banbury, on Wednesday.

Mr Springate realised it might be one of the undated coins and double-checked with diagrams printed in a national newspaper and on The Mint’s website.

He said he was “really chuffed” to find out it was the real deal, adding: “I felt like Charlie from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory winning a golden ticket.”

Mr Springate has put the coin on eBay with a reserve for £400 but said he was not looking to sell it quickly.

He said: “The longer I leave it the more it is going to be worth.

I’m going to wait and see roughly what I can get for it and as long as it’s a nice tidy sum I’ll be happy.

“In my view anything more than £50 is a bonus.”

Yesterday there were scores of the 20ps on eBay, with bids in the hundreds rather than thousands of pounds.

When the sale goes through he said he would either use the money to pay off some of his debts or take his girlfriend Victoria Meadow away on holiday.

The Royal Mint blunder is thought to have happened because of the introduction of new coins bearing part of the royal coat of arms on the ‘tails’ side and a new profile of the Queen on the other.

To accomodate the new design, the date was moved to the heads side, but it is believed that during the production process for this batch, an ‘old’ dateless ‘heads’ side and new ‘tails’ side were used.

Royal Mint spokesman Jason Raj said it had rigorous quality controls in place and said it was almost unheard of for something like this to happen.

He said that only one batch got past the checking process.

Last year about 136 million 20p coins were minted so in comparison only a tiny fraction of coins were faulty.

Mr Raj added: “It’s not really a problem because the coins are still legal tender.”