Ethical Dilemna - Finding Money In Random Places

[mheslep]

If a law can't be enforced, it has no practical effect. ...

Such laws have a decidedly bad effect: they encourage a disrespect for the rule of law.

 

[Chi Meson]

In third grade, I found a 2-dollar bill (the bicentennial edition) in the hallway of my school. A friend was with me at the time. I didn't even think about other options; I took it to the main office.

I found out, months later, that the friend I was with claimed it as his own. He was able to describe what he lost and exactly where and when he lost it. As he showed it off to the rest of the class I knew that he knew that I knew what went on, and that I'd never turn him in because he was my "friend."

Boy, did I learn a lesson that day.

And today, for me, the threshold for trying to return found money is somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars, depending on the situation.

 

[Chi Meson]

You are right , is it possible to add it now?


I found the $ 10 bill on the sidewalk and did not have the ingenuity to plan for a foolproof way to find the owner , anyone is able to claim it as their own ... it's just plain dumb to ask the question from door to door because if you had the moral incentive to find the owner you also have the full obligation to find the rightful owner and this means inevitably doing more research and questioning the validity of anyone who claims the money to be theirs. You just may find that your neighbor is an ***hole.

And thus the question arises , are you creating more trouble by investigating the matter , since you might as well keep it for yourself - regardless of how much is involved - if you do not want to do a full proof investigation. And if you were to give it to the police , how would they really manage it , would they have the capacity to find the rightful owner?

The police would hold on to the money for a while, giving the owner a chance to claim it. And after a period of time has passed, the money would go to you. Depending on the quality of the local police, the finder usually gets it. Sometimes the petty cash of the precinct gets a bump.

 

[neu]

Anyone who has said they would hand in 1000's of $ in a marked bag but keep an unmarked to themself is a closet thief.

This is equivalent to saying I would steal money only if I could be sure I won't get caught. At least actual thieves have no pretense about what they are.

 

[arildno]

Anyone who has said they would hand in 1000's of $ in a marked bag but keep an unmarked one are closet thieves.

This is equivalent to saying I would steal money only if I could be sure I won't get caught. At least actual thieves have no pretense about what they are.

Not at all. It has nothing to do with whether or not you could be "caught".

 

[neu]

Not at all. It has nothing to do with whether or not you could be "caught".

So what is the difference between a marked and unmarked bag if it's not about being caught? The obvious implication of a marked bag is that an organisation will have ways of tracking the money and finding you, where as an individual will not.

You'd be a fool to think that no-one would miss 1000s of $ just because they didn't write their name on the bag

Also, why have you used quotation marks around caught?

 

[mheslep]

So what is the difference between a marked and unmarked bag if it's not about being caught? The obvious implication of a marked bag is that an organisation will have ways of tracking the money and finding you, where as an individual will not.

You'd be a fool to think that no-one would miss 1000s of $ just because they didn't write their name on the bag...

The issue is the practicality of return. At some point without more information it becomes impossible to reliably return a non descript sum of cash of small amounts.

 

[arildno]

Re-reading neu, I think he primarily was thinking of LARGE amounts of money, rather than amounts of money in general.

If that is the case, I am in agreement with him, because:
1. Since a bag of lots of money quite probably might be critical evidence in a criminal case, we have a citizen's duty to return the money to the police

2. Even if that were not the case, the probability of an unidentifiable original owner sharply decreases with the amount in question.

 

[LowlyPion]

Ultimately I think it all revolves around the ethics of the situation for the individual as the OP asks, and where the individual draws the line for the situation, because with such highly liquid objects as cash, the issues of common law or local statute pretty much disappear into the gray fog of enforceability or practicality as far as return or enforcement, and rest more with the issues of personal ethics.

Not surprisingly it seems that people are tending to draw the line short of exceeding the conceptually related (but different charges of) petty larceny and grand larceny, that loosely depending on jurisdiction, maybe taken as $500. (Petty larceny tending to be a misdemeanor as opposed to grand larceny a felony.)

 

[Evo]

I've got one for you, and this actually happened.

A woman bought an old rundown house. She hired a contractor to restore the house. The contractor found a metal box containing $182,000.00 dollars when he was renovating. The people that sold the house found out about the money, that must have been put there by a deceased relative that originally owned the house, and they tried to claim the money.

The woman bought the house legally, and there were no stipulations in the sale that anything found in the house would not belong to her, so the sellers had no legal claim.

The woman legally owned the house and everything in it, the contractor found it, the sellers said "oh wow, our ancestor must have put that money there".

Everyone claimed ownership, the homeowner, the contractor, and the sellers. How was this resolved in court?

 

[Proton Soup]

well, the contractor has no valid claim.

 

[neu]

RE Evo's example.

If it was obviously left by a relative of the previous owner, i.e. had some form of ID or money could be dated to period relative lived in the house, then the current owner would have to be a bit of a c*** to keep it, even if she has legal ownership.

What happened, is there a link?

 

[Evo]

Here is what happened. To me, the current homeowner would be the owner of the money, she bought the house and everything in it.

The contractor was hired to renovate, he has no claim to anything he "finds" inside that person's house.

The family of the original owner that sold the house sold it as is. They had no idea that there was money, and the money wasn't left to anyone in a will (otherwise they'd have been looking for it). I guess this would be equivalent to someone selling a locked trunk at a garage sale and the purchaser finding rare comic books worth a fortune in it.

Anyway, here's the news story. What do you think?

Cash Hidden in Ohio House Walls Becomes Contractor's Nightmare

A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars, but he feels some vindication.

The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob Kitts, who couldn't agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda Reece.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,449114,00.html

 

[neu]

"If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it," said attorney Gid Marcinkevicius, who represents the Dunne estate. "Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost."

I find it funny that the attorney would admit that they shouldn't have told anyone, he's right of course; if they wanted to keep the money.

For some reason I'm on the side of the builder even though I can't see how he has right to any of it. I'm surprised the court gave him a share.

Surely legally it's hers, but morally it belongs to the closest relatives of the Dune fella.

Maybe I'm deluded, but I'd feel a little guilty spending $14000 of the money on a trip to Hawaii

 

[Proton Soup]

wow, that's not a contractor i'd want to hire. he'd probably get more business if he moved.

 

[TVP45]

It seems the most important issue would not be whether you could reasonably find the owner (scattered money rule) or whether you could get away with it, but rather what amount of money is your private, personal sense of honesty worth?

 

[JasonRox]

If I found a money bag with a large sum of money in a pretty quiet/remote area, I would keep it for sure.

Call me a thief. I don't care. I have a bag full of money.

 

[Monique]

If I found a money bag with a large sum of money in a pretty quiet/remote area, I would keep it for sure.

Call me a thief. I don't care. I have a bag full of money.

And if you found a credit card you'd also spend all the money? I wonder how you can live with yourself if you steal from another person like that. How about when you find a diamond ring, you'd also keep it?

 

[Dadface]

I lost ten dollars the other day and apparently it blew over the pond to a place called my suburbia.If anyone finds it will you please blow it back.

 

[etania]

BRAVO, Dadface :) a nice joke and a good answer for the so called "dilemma".

Actually, I do not see any dilemma here. To take or not to take? :) It's INDIVIDUAL. No statistics (if the statistics is the purpose of the "poll") can be done, because then you should ask a hundred of further questions - what your annual income is, how often you "find" money on the road, how many kids you have got to feed, how you are going to spend the picked-up $10/100/million etc.
So.. I do not see the point of the question. If the author is teased with remorses, then - take it easy :) forget :)
for me it would be more interesting to do a research on people's behaviour when they unexpectedly get a large sum (from a legal source). But then the question arises - what the large sum is...