Man finds $7.5 million inside a storage unit he bought for $500. Then, the former owner returned

Storage spaces are meant for items that one rarely uses or just memories, but no one expects to find a hidden treasure in there. But destiny had something different planned for a man who bought a storage space for merely $500 but walked home with millions as a return on his investment. The story of this lucky buyer who was surprised to find a pile of cash was also narrated by "Storage Wars" star Dan Dotson.

Finding Cash Amidst Trash

Dotson who operates his own auction house and frequently stars in Storage Wars on A&E, revealed in an online video how a woman approached him with the story of a friend who purchased a storage unit, auctioned off by him.

The woman shared that her friend found a mysterious safe inside the storage unit that they couldn't open. Dotson recalled the woman saying that the first professional they called couldn't do it but a second person did it.

“When that person opened it up, inside the safe, normally they’re empty, but this time it wasn’t empty, it had $7.5 million cash inside,” Dotson revealed.

Dotson and his wife, Laura went on to speculate where the money would've come from. "Credit card went bad, it was finished, they moved away, perhaps the person went to jail... who knows what it was," Laura said. While the finder may have thought they struck gold, the story didn't end as they would've wanted. 

Here's the Catch

Dotson further revealed that when the original owners of the unit heard about the cash, they quickly contacted the new owner. Dotson says that they initially offered the buyer of the unit $600,000 to return the money, and then doubled it to $1.2 million. Finally, the two parties reached a settlement and the buyer walked away with almost $1.5 million in profit on a $500 investment.

Dotson said that he too would have taken the $1.2 million reward with no questions asked. This was because he felt that it wasn't clean money and he wouldn't want to find out how far the former owners would go to get their money back. “$7.5 million is a lot of money… but that’s a lot of running, too," he said. 

While this incredible discovery wasn't featured on "Storage Wars," similar incredible discoveries have made it to the reality show over the years. For instance, in season 3, Darrell "The Gambler" Sheets lucked out similarly on a $3,600 storage unit. While looking through the items to recoup their investment, Sheets and his partner found paintings from a renowned Mexican artist Frank Gutierrez.

Unsure of what to do with the dozens of paintings, Sheets called in an expert to get a fair valuation. The expert immediately acknowledged the remarkable find and noted that there was a large part of Gutierrez's work stored in the unit.

When sheets asked about the value of the painting, the expert took a moment to say that it could be worth a whopping $300,000. This prompted Sheets to flip his $3,600 unit for hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.