A funny (and seemingly legal, if absurd) proposal during the current debt ceiling debate is to mint a one trillion dollar platinum coin and deposit it with the Treasury to reduce the debt below the limit. This leads to the amusing hypothetical case of someone stealing said trillion dollar coin from the Treasury, or the coin somehow going missing (gets lost in a couch and the couch is sold as-is in a federal auction).
Are there any means by which someone could become the legal owner of this coin, and thereby have a one trillion dollar plus net worth, without actually earning one trillion dollars and buying it? I figure if it's actually stolen property, even if all statutes of limitation have passed and even if you committed no crimes in acquiring it, you'd probably be required to return it, but I'm not sure on this, especially in cases where you committed no crime yourself (e.g. if the auction scenario mentioned above occurred because the thieves dropped the coin on their way out of the building with the buyer legally and inadvertently acquiring the coin as part of the auctioned item).
We can ignore the practical issues with proving it's "the real coin" rather than a counterfeit; I'm just curious about the legality assuming the coin was made in some way that rendered it immune to counterfeiting (handwaves explanation).
Yes, this is a hypothetical, but I'd be willing to bet if any such coin existed, there'd be at least one movie made that involved either stealing it or becoming an overnight trillionaire by accident, so I figured I'd get the jump on the plausibility of such a movie.