How A Storage Wars Prank Led To $6k Bids On Lockers

Nabila Haniss was not one of the original cast members of "Storage Wars," and she never became one of the breakout stars of the series. But in her short-lived run on the show, she often gave the other buyers a run for their money. Haniss came to fame in the storage locker business before the show even started when, according to ABC News, back in 2007, she caused a stir after buying and selling a locker belonging to wealthy socialite Paris Hilton. She sold the locker's contents to a person who went by the name of Bardia Persa for $10 million. Persa used the contents of the locker to start a website called ParisExposed. Hilton sued both Haniss and Persa over the website.

Haniss' second claim to fame came in 2019, long after she left the show, when, according to Yahoo News, she bought a locker that contained military-grade equipment that may have been used in an espionage attack. While this may be worth a good chunk of change, Haniss wasn't allowed to keep the equipment as the government seized it.

But when Haniss wasn't selling a socialite's property or getting her locker winnings seized by the government, she was often just the one to jack up the prices and make other buyers overpay for lockers. In one case, Haniss drove the bidding up over $6,000 for a locker that wasn't worth anywhere near that amount.

In the Season 2 episode "Operation Hobo," Nabila Haniss drove the bidding ridiculously high. There were a lot of high jinks in this episode, including Dave Hester showing up with huge trucks with his name on them (which he barely filled), and Barry Weiss tricking the other buyers into thinking he was an old man on oxygen who wandered in by accident. Haniss, growing tired of the shenanigans, ran the bidding up on a locker with two motorcycles in it (although the motorcycles had to be auctioned separately from the locker, leading to some drama) so that Darrell Sheets, a.k.a. "The Gambler," took the bait and bought the locker for $6,650. He fell over $3,000 short of making even on the unit, even after finding a nifty-looking dart gun in it.

Sheets was one of the popular characters on the show, but, according to IMDB, he didn't return to the show immediately when it came back from hiatus in 2021. It's hardly surprising because, in March of 2019, Sheets revealed on Instagram that he suffered two back-to-back heart attacks, requiring emergency surgery. Sheets finally made his return to the show in 2022 when he appeared in the episode "Piles to Go Before We Sleep." We're certainly glad the "Storage Wars" star pulled through.