2p sells for £485 with people told there are many more out there

A rare 2p coin has sold for an astonishing £485 on eBay – and you may have one.

Coin collectors are on the hunt and telling people to check the backs of their sofa, their pockets and their purses for the highly sought after coin.

The two pence piece has been branded “rare” and can sell for 25,000 times its value.

One, sold in Granton, in Edinburgh, last year, fetched as much as £485 on the online auction website – causing many more to start checking for one.

It was sold in January 2020 after the coin was minted in error in 2015.

It has made headlines ever since, as it becomes one of the most wanted pence pieces in the world.

It was accidentally struck onto the nickel-plated steel base of a 10p instead of the copper-plated steel used for 2p coins.

Such mistakes at The Royal Mint – which can manufacture up to four million pennies a day – result in ‘error coins’ known as ‘mules’.

These mules are extremely rare, as most are spotted by the Royal Mint’s strict quality controls and never released into general circulation.

That makes them valuable to collectors who are willing to pay way above the coin’s face value to add them to their collections.

The seller said he bought the coin from a friend in Thames Ditton, Surrey in 2018.

A similar coin sold for £1,350 at auction back in 2016, nearly 70,000 times more than the actual value of the coin.