'Storage Wars' star claims a man discovered $7.5m inside storage unit he bought for just $500

We've all had that dream; you know, the one where you discover untold riches in a seemingly innocuous location.

This is probably why so many of us play the lottery; the allure of all that cash for very little effort is simply too seductive to ignore.

However, for one man, this was not merely a whimsical dream that never came to fruition, nor a hopeless punt on the lottery numbers, but rather an actual event that happened in his life.

Dan Dotson, American Auctioneers owner and star of reality show Storage Wars, says that a woman approached him at a charity auction in California to tell him, "My husband works for a guy and he bought a unit from you for $500 (£390) and it had a safe in it.”

This is where the story begins in earnest.

The unnamed man is then said to have hired a locksmith to open the safe, but "The first person that they called to open the safe could not or did not,” says Dotson.

Dotson says that a second man was then asked to open the safe, which he did successfully.

This time?

“This time it was not empty it had $7.5m cash inside the safe”.

Dotson says that the woman told him a lawyer representing the initial owners of the safe then got in touch with the man who had bought it.

They are said to have first offered the man $600,000 for the safe return of the cash, which he declined. The second offer was a reward of $1.2m, which he accepted.

Dotson and his wife then discussed what they would do under the circumstances, with wife Laura saying "I don’t feel like it would be clean money”.

“I would not ask a damn thing,” Dotson added, “$7.5 million is a lot of money… but that’s a lot of running too.”

Bizarrely, the storage unit is said to have come up for auction because its owners had not been paying its rental fees. Dotson's wife Laura reckons it happens more often than you'd think;

"They moved away, perhaps a person went to jail. Who knows what it was?

"But you know it happens all the time. This is the modern day treasure hunt."

While the unnamed man may not have walked away with $7.5m, he still made a hefty return on his $500 investment.