All week "Good Morning America" has helped people cash in and find unclaimed money in our series, "Show Me the Money."
"GMA" consumer correspondent Elisabeth Leamy helped one family get their share of the $16.3 billion in unredeemed savings bonds held at the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt.
Tuesday, we helped the Shaluta family of West Virginia get nearly $15,000 in unclaimed money that Vickie Shaluta didn't know her mother had left her when she died.
After helping people find cash they didn't even know they had, we got a huge response online. Our website was flooded with viewers who caught the "unclaimed money fever."
D'anne John tried our tips and wrote into our website saying that it worked. "I found money for my sister, my mom, my mother-in-law, nephew, and my husband. I love GMA!!!"
Latonya Davison told us her success story: "I was owed $60 from an old cell phone account. The state of Florida had it. It's legit."
Lost property
Property is generally deemed to have been lost if it is found in a place where the true owner likely did not intend to set it down, and where it is not likely to be found by the true owner. At common law, the finder of a lost item could claim the right to possess the item against any person except the true owner or any previous possessors.
The underlying policy goals to these distinctions are to (hopefully) see that the property is returned to its true original owner, or "title owner." Most jurisdictions have now enacted statutes requiring that the finder of lost property turn it in to the proper authorities; if the true owner does not arrive to claim the property within a certain period of time, the property is returned to the finder as his own, or is disposed of. In Britain, many public businesses have a lost property desk, which in the United States would be called a lost and found.
Many exceptions may be applied at common law to the rule that the first finder of lost property has a superior claim of right over any other person except the previous owner. For example, a trespasser's claim to lost property which he finds while trespassing is generally inferior to the claim of the respective landowner. As a corollary to this exception, a landowner has superior claim over a find made within the non-public areas of his property, so if a customer finds lost property in the public area of a store, the customer has superior claim to the lost property over that of the store-owner, but if the customer finds the lost property in the non-public area of that store, such as an area marked "Employees Only," the store-owner will have superior claim, as the customer was trespassing when he found it.
The status of finders as employees or tenants of the landowner complicates matters, because employees and tenants have legitimate access to non-public areas of a landowner's property that others would not, without trespassing. Employees and tenants, however, still usually lose superior claim over lost property to their employers or landlords if the property is found within the scope of their employment, or outside the actual leased area, respectively.
For example, if the lost property is found by a tenant inside the walls of his leasehold, or by an employee embedded within the soil of an estate owned by his employer, the landowner (as employer or landlord) of the property where it was found usually has a superior claim of right over that of the finder. However, this is not always the case, as a long-term tenant who finds lost property within the leased area of his leasehold may have a superior claim over that of his landlord (especially if the landlord has never been to the property). While employers usually have a superior claim over lost property found by their employees, exceptions to this exist as well, as modern law sometimes grants the employee superior claim if turning over lost property to his employer is not part of his job description (such as if the employee is an interior decorator).
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