I have been coin roll hunting since I was a child, starting about 1989. Finding coins to hunt has never been harder. The best and easiest way to find coins to hunt consistently is to have your bank order boxes of the coins for you to search. Most banks are reluctant to do that these days. Sometimes you will have to open a business account. This can be easier if you already have a limited liability company set up, or if you already have an EIN for a side activity that you already do. These are called “bank wrapped” rolls and are typically better quality to search than rolls wrapped by customers.

Customer rolls are suspect. Any marked roll, particularly half dollars, has probably already been searched. Although, you may still find something they missed. Customer rolls in old wraps are particularly deceptive. Even if the rolls were wrapped decades ago, they still may contain nothing valuable. People saved coins more frequently decades ago and more people were knowledgeable about numismatics. In some denominations, I have had consistently better finds than I did 20-30 years ago.

If you find a large quantity, usually 20 rolls or more, of a particular denomination of customer wrapped rolls in the same wrap at a bank, this is usually because someone has “dumped” those coins at the bank after already having searched them. This is particularly true of half dollars. Any amount of customer wrapped half dollars over $100 is very suspect to be someone else’s dumps.

Bank wrapped rolls are easier to obtain at banks if you trade your rolled coins to the bank for them, especially if you are at a bank that is not local to you. One of my favorite parts of the hobby is comparing coins of different areas. I have consistently found that economically depressed and more rural areas tend to yield better coin roll hunting finds. In large urban areas, though, you are more likely to obtain boxes of freshly minted coins rolled by one of the coin processing companies. These freshly rolled coins can sometimes be sold for a considerable profit, if they are of a particular year and mint mark.