New York treasure hunters who won $100,000 magnet fishing must wait 9 months to enjoy their wealth – here’s why

The couple who caught a safe full of $100,000 while magnet fishing in a Queens lake may have hit the jackpot – but they won’t get their hands on it until next year.

James Kane and Barbie Agostini lugged their muddy and soaked riches to the Treasury Department in Washington, DC, last Friday, where an 11-person team will spend up to nine months sifting through the soggy cash and replacing it with new bills.

When they are finished, the new pile of cash will be handed over to Kane and Agostini tax-free.

“The beautiful America!” Kane told the New York Times.

The Treasury Department has a team in its Office of Engraving and Printing dedicated exclusively to the strange – but not unusual – predicament in which Kane and Agostini found themselves.

Typically, the crew deals with leftover money – sometimes literally turned to dust – that family members find buried in their backyards.

In contrast, it seems much easier to find Kane’s decaying cash, especially since the lucky fisherman estimates that only about 40 percent of the roughly $100,000 he found survived the two weeks on land.

He also regretted leaving bundles of banknotes in the park that he thought were irreparably destroyed, he told the newspaper.

The couple turned to the government for help after their story went viral and long-lost friends and near-strangers came crawling out of their holes to get their hands on their find.

“All the immediate attention we are getting from this money is making us a little crazy and a little scared,” Kane wrote in an email to the Treasury Department.

“We don’t have much money, so we’re going to spend everything we have on a bus to get there,” he continued, adding that his plight is temporary because the money is becoming fragile and starting to decay.

In the lobby of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, officials immediately estimated that Kane had between $50,000 and $70,000.

The couple didn’t expect to hit the jackpot when they dropped their magnetic fishing rod into a Queens pond earlier this month.

The couple, who film their adventures for YouTube, have found many safes, but most were empty.

Instead, they found two stacks of hundred-dollar bills covered in mud.

To avoid legal trouble, they called the New York Police Department, but the police told them whoever found it could keep it.

“This is the most significant find in the history of treasure hunting among poor people,” Kane said.