Money mattress

Treasure hunters yearn to strike gold. 

When Parisian Julien Navas visited the United States to watch a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida, he also decided to check out the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. 

The park, which lets the public hunt for precious stones on its 37-acre grounds for a fee, piqued the interest of the gold and fossil enthusiast. Navas bought a hunting kit from the park and on the morning of 11 January tried his luck looking for diamonds in a muddy field. 

Fortunately, the back-breaking work yielded results. Navas found a peanut-size brown diamond. The park’s Diamond Discovery Center appraised it at 7.46 carats.

The diamond, which Navas named Carine after his fiancé, was not only “the eighth largest diamond found in the Crater of Diamonds since it became a state park in 1972,” CNN reported, it was also worth $28,000, according to Yahoo News Australia and Jam Press. 

Finding treasure is not limited to mining areas. For a Chinese scavenger, recycling garbage generates cash. 

The guy from Wuzhou, China found a discarded mattress on the roadside and stripped it of its padding to get the springs to sell to a junk shop. 

He was surprised to find several 100-yuan bills inserted among the springs as shown on a video played by GMA Integrated Newsfeed. 

Each bill was equivalent to P800, which earned him a hefty sum from the “money” mattress.