Can I give you some money? Hear me now, thank me later

For those of you in the USA… do you know about the concept of unclaimed property? Every state (should) has a mechanism for collecting outstanding funds. They are often amounts owed to people where the holder cannot get in touch with the recipient. After a period of time, the holder will remit the amount back to the state, per legal requirements. Those funds can easily sit for many years with the state, unclaimed.

Enterprising debt collector types often download databases of information about unclaimed property and the names assigned to them. They will then search through every state site to find a possible match. Once found, they then send letters out to them, informing of an unclaimed amount of money that’s waiting for them. And, if the person contacted responds, the debt collector will offer to broker the retrieval, for a fee. These opportunists charge high fees that rightfully belong to the recipient.

If you ever get a letter like this, don’t respond. All you have to do is take it upon yourself to look up online for the “unclaimed property” site of a given state. Search results usually come back easily with the URL for the official site. Once there, you can go about searching yourself. It’s VERY easy. Usually all is required is your FIRST NAME, LAST NAME, and CITY. If there’s any unclaimed funds, you’ll get hits and some additional info depending upon the state.

It does feel a little… “exposed,” in that anyone who knows your name and a city where you lived can look you up and see if there’s anything unclaimed. The thing is, they can’t initiate a claim without your SSN. The good thing is that you can do the lookup for relatives. I just did that for my mother and my deceased stepfather, and found a couple of entries. So after getting the identifying info from mom, I could submit the claims. It also turned out that my sister and her husband each have an unclaimed line item, so I informed them as well.

I’ve done this before in other states where I lived. If the amount is above a certain value, the state will contact you to confirm additional information and may require your sending a photocopy of your photo ID. For smaller amounts, you may end up getting just a letter in the mail to your current address and be asked to respond back for confirmation, and possibly submit some additional documentation.

Anyway, I know a large number of people here are in the USA, so I figured why not share it. I don’t know how this works in other countries… maybe there’s a similar mechanism. But a lot of people aren’t aware this exists and billions can be sitting in the hands of a government office, just waiting for someone to make a claim on it.

If you’re successful, post about your good fortune! :grin:

3 Thanks

Having checked just my name once before several years ago, I’m now going to set an annual reminder.

Thank you for posting this thread! :+1:

1 Thank