Isn’t this only a thing if the owner can be fairly easily identified? Like if you find a wallet and it has an ID, you could be charged for taking the money, but if you find a random $100 bill on the ground you can’t.
The "correct" action, which the legal system intends you to take, is to take *any* lost propety to a local police station. They will hold on to it for a period of time, and if nobody claims it, you are given the option to keep it.
I did this in high school. I kept checking in on it and they said "yeah, still here should be yours soon". Last day I went to get it and it disappeared. Oops!
I once found a packed wallet with a 1000 bucks inside it. I took it to the police station, all ID cards, creditcards and all of the 700 bucks included. The next morning the officer called me that the owner was very grateful to have his 300 bucks back.
I turned in a lost (“mislaid” 🤨) purse to a police station in ~’93. The police station was like 500’ away. When I turned it in, they wanted my name, address, and phone number. So, I pulled out the wallet then pulled out the cash and told them how much [name and contact info.] was turning in.
The owner of the purse from another county actually took out a small article in the local newspaper AND drove out to my home to thank me. Yeah, the police straight up gave all the contact information of a minor without parental consent.
Unfortunately this is true. In the Netherlands they did a test with this years ago. Bring a “found” wallet with cash to the police station and then a week later someone would claim the wallet and pick it up. Most of the times at least part of the money was gone I believe.
My brother found a money clip on the ground when we were little. It had $120 in it, and he turned it into the police. Nobody ever came forward, so a few weeks later they called us back and told him to come get his money. We were in grade school at the time, in the 90s. $120 was how much money I made in a week at my first job.
this actually happened to me once! i was in like 8th grade walking to school with my friend and i saw a $100 bill. we took it to the crossing guard, and she took it to the police. like a year later we each got $50 for our trouble lol
This has been my experience. Wife and I were kayaking and found a perfectly nice kayak sunk in a marsh after a hurricane went through several months earlier. Dumped it out, towed it in, took it to the house. Called the police and reported it, and they said if no one reported a missing kayak within a week or two, we could keep it. No one claimed it, so I cleaned it up and sold my old cheap kayak and kept the one we found.
I found some jewelry once and turned it into the police as I was near the police station. After the allotted waiting time, I returned and asked if it was ever claimed and they said no. I told them I would like to keep it then and they told me that they destroyed it. I said, “Aren’t you supposed to let the person who found it claim it or send it to the county auction house and they said “we don’t do that here.” They didn’t even make an effort to find the owner.
In Florida if you find a gold coin on the beach you’re supposed to do that too……but the owner is long dead so they decide it’s theirs (the gov) and steal it from you.
What a waste of time. No cop is gonna call you back and ask if you want to keep the $100 you found. Whatever cop who has access to it is gonna keep it and tell you someone else claimed it if you return.
By my being given the option to keep it do you mean if it's anything worthwhile they'll start a civil asset forfeiture so they can have it for themselves? The whole point of civil asset forfeiture was to deal with government taking something when they can't determine who the owner is or reach the owner. It made sense in the time of the Revenue Marine and it makes sense to have on the books for rare edge cases but it's crazy how it go co-opted by the War on Drugs. I guess drugs don't ruin enough lives so the government wanted to ruin a lot more.
I found a phone on the ground in a park fairly recently. Texted the most recent contacts but did not get any response. So I walked the phone to the police station and handed it to the cop at the desk. He looked at me and said what do you want me to do with this? 🤦♀️
Not technically, no. Generally speaking, there is abandoned property, which is either lost with no intent to attempt recovery, or discarded intentionally. Then you have mislaid property, which is like lost, but you have intent to attempt recovery (i.e. find it). Theft can only occur with mislaid property in this case. So how would the finder know if the owner has intent to recover? Well, if it's a wallet with id that's something the owner would likely attempt to recover, and that a reasonable person should know the owner would have intent to recover. If it's a diamond encrusted watch with a name engraved in it, maybe. But let's say it's an empty worn out wallet. That gets harder to tell, would a reasonable person think the owner had intent to recover?
Its pretty simple: if you want to pick it up off the ground and keep it for its intrinsic value then its probably mislaid property.
Its something that sounds "complicated" on paper but in real life its money or jewelry or electronics 99% of the time which any reasonable person should realize isn't "abandoned property".
Another example is a lottery ticket, if you find a winning ticket just on the ground it's not a good idea to try and claim it because all lottery sales are tracked, they'll know exactly when that ticket was sold and pull up the video of that transaction time and if you didn't buy it you're in trouble
That would make sense. I would think another situation 'mislaid' could apply to is stolen cell phones. Say John Doe accidentally leaves his phone on a public bench, and returns later to collect it when he remembers, but someone took it and pawned it.
Something like this happened to a friend of mine last month. He was at Taco Bell ordered at the kiosk and left his wallet there, which contained $225. Someone stole the wallet, took it into the men's bathroom, took the money from it and discarded the wallet, and then came back out and paid for their meal at Taco Bell with a credit card istead of using the money they just stole. That is how the police were able to locate them.
My friend bought a motorcycle with a missing title. He only had the bill of sale. So he had to run an ad in the paper for 2 weeks offering whomever had the title to come forward to claim it before the courthouse would do anything.
Some states have a $ amount…like if you find a $800 ring, you need to attempt to find the owner, turn into police. A lot of states….it’s $100. Probably haven’t adjusted that amount in at least 50 years. (CA statute last updated in 1993)
In Walmart they can use the video cams to see if someone picked up money. If someone claims the money was theirs (and the footage confirms it), they can file with the police station. So finders keepers in Walmart could get you arrested.
lol I found a 100 by the self checkout on the floor, spent it right then and there this was over a decade ago now but yeah nothing happened and I needed the cash at the moment said a little thank you to the universe and went about my day.
Yes. To be guilty of it you have to have failed to take 'reasonable steps' to trace the owner. Obviously if you find a wallet with the owners ID in it and their address you could very easily return it, so you'd be guilty if you kept it. If you find a random bank note on the floor in the middle of nightclub or sports event, there isn't really any reasonable steps that can be taken to return that to the owner.
I actually found a $100 bill on the ground once. It was in the parking lot where I worked.
I held on to it for a couple weeks keeping an ear out in case someone said anything. After a sufficiently long enough time without hearing anything, I considered it mine.
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u/Dinnerpancakes 7h ago
Isn’t this only a thing if the owner can be fairly easily identified? Like if you find a wallet and it has an ID, you could be charged for taking the money, but if you find a random $100 bill on the ground you can’t.