Unclaimed property worth billions - The Washington Post
The emails kept coming with promises of free money, and the Rev. Alan DeFriese kept ignoring them, convinced they were part of a scam.
“It felt very much like the ‘Nigerian prince’ emails that come through that say, ‘All you need to do is contact us with your banking information, and we’re going to wire you a lot of money,’” said DeFriese, who heads the Peninsula Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter in Newport News, Va. “It sounded nonsensical to us. Who calls you up and says, ‘Hey, we have something of yours, and it’s possibly valuable, and you should claim it’?”
The Virginia treasury’s Diana Shaban does. She and other employees in the treasury’s Unclaimed Property Division call, email and hold public events to reconnect people with missing assets and valuables. Sometimes the claim is worth pennies. Sometimes it’s worth a million dollars or more.
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In DeFriese’s case, he found out the Christian mission was the beneficiary of upward of $112,000. The money came from a Wells Fargo Bank account whose mysterious owner directed that the funds go to the homeless shelter upon his death. But a mix-up delayed the bequest for approximately 18 years.
“We were shocked,” DeFriese said. “For a ministry our size, that was a monstrous check. We were asking — how?”
By law, Virginia’s treasury takes possession of any unclaimed tangible and intangible property from banks, insurance companies and other institutions. Anywhere from $150 million to $200 million rolls in every year.
The scenarios that lead to the Unclaimed Property Division are about as varied as the assets there. Dividend checks get lost in the mail or land in a sock drawer. Someone misspells the name of the beneficiary on a life insurance policy or garbles the recipient’s address. People move, and utilities holding their security deposits lack forwarding addresses. An elderly parent dies, and his children never hear about the safe-deposit box he kept with coins, old bonds or other valuables.
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After specified period of time — generally two to five years or more — banks, insurance companies and other such institutions are required to turn over unclaimed assets to the commonwealth’s treasury. All 50 states and the District have similar laws and programs, which are seen as consumer protections.
In practice, it’s almost like a kind of lottery that people play unwittingly. Their stories are those of careful financial plans and savings gone awry, of best intentions undone by something as simple as a typographical error — or as complex as family dysfunction. The treasury once tracked down the rightful owner of $1 million, who told Shaban he would prefer to let the money rot rather than stir more family infighting.
Many more stories end happily, though. In February, Shaban traveled to the District, where the Unclaimed Property Division presented the Salvation Army with a check for $89,498.30 in unclaimed assets from various Virginia locations, including the proceeds of a life insurance policy that misspelled the beneficiary as Salvation Amy. Last fiscal year, the treasury set a record by reuniting people with $87.1 million.
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It can happen to anybody — as Manju Ganeriwala, Virginia’s Treasurer of the Commonwealth, can attest.
Nearly 40 years ago, Ganeriwala worked for an Ohio utility that gave employees stock options. But Ganeriwala was young and didn’t really understand how the incentive plan worked. Later on, she moved to Virginia. Years went by, until one day Ohio’s treasury came calling to say the state was holding her utility stock.
“I’m thinking, ‘I never purchased any stock. What are you talking about?’ ” Ganeriwala recalled. The claim was legit, however, and she cashed in the shares for about $200. She also got in the habit of searching unclaimed property websites like the one her own department maintains: www.vamoneysearch.org.
Virginia’s unclaimed loot has ranged from bonds issued by the Confederate States of America to ancient gold coins. Even stolen property seized by law enforcement agencies sometimes ends up in the treasury’s vault.
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The hoard is so huge — about $2 billion — that the treasury siphons off investment earnings to support the commonwealth’s Literary Fund and other K-12 education projects. Last year, the treasury donated $130 million.
Besides tracking down possible claimants from her Richmond office, Shaban travels the commonwealth for public outreach events. In March, she and a team member set up a table in the Springfield Town Center and practically begged people to try a quick search of the treasury’s online database. It often took some doing to convince passersby that the operation wasn’t a scam or an elaborate state-sponsored sting for tax cheats.
“Yes, sir — let’s find you some money,” Shaban said to an elderly gent. “It’s free, it’s easy. We give you money back.”
An Alexandria woman told Shaban that there was no way the treasury had anything of hers because she didn’t have much to begin with.
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“I wish I had a penny for everybody who told me that,” Shaban told her.
But Chris Joy was glad to try his luck, because a similar operation in Maryland recovered $200 for him from a Discover card account.
In minutes, Shaban’s teammate, Kayleigh Rosenthal, found $7 for him, probably from a tax refund. Then she found $25 for his wife from an old Verizon account.
“It’s amazing,” said Joy, 47, a security officer who lives in Arlington. “We pay so many bills, it’s always possible that you’ve overpaid something or you’re entitled to a return or refund — and you don’t always know that. [But] if you owe them, they’ll find you and come after you. It’s nice you can find the money in the other direction.”
By noon, about one of every three people had hit pay dirt. The biggest return was $130.46 for an Alexandria man who had a hard time believing the event was on the up and up.
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“I’ve never been accosted and asked if they could give me money,” said the man, who didn’t want to be identified.
Shaban was clearly having fun by then, which is why she said it’s easy to recruit other treasury employees to volunteer their time to help search for claimants. Who could resist making someone happy by finding them free money?
“They’re crying, we’re crying,” Shaban said. “[Everyone’s] very passionate about this.”
Shaban recalled working a similar public event years ago when she invited another vendor to try doing a search.
“We’re the only vendor giving money away at these events,” she told him. But the vendor waved her off, convinced there was no way he had ever lost anything in Virginia.
As it turns out, the vendor’s father had purchased stock for him years earlier. The father, using the address of the business where he worked, put the shares in his son’s name. After the father’s death, shareholder mailings continued going to his former place of business. Employees there — apparently not recognizing the family name — ignored the notices or threw them out.
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“So the son never knew anything about this,” said Shaban — until his chance encounter with her made him $25,000 richer.
Shaban’s memory vault holds a wealth of stories like these. There’s the widow who moved out of state to live with an adult daughter because both were barely making ends meet. Shaban hunted her down with some welcome news: The widow’s husband had put aside $300,000 in certificates of deposit for her that the widow never knew about.
Then there’s the coin collector who lost some extremely valuable gold coins in 2007. He kept the coins — some of which had been struck during the Byzantine Empire — in multiple safe-deposit boxes. While sorting through them in preparation for an out-of-state move, he spread his collection out inside a Richmond-area bank vault. Somehow, he also left behind a container with 92 coins.
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By the time he discovered the coins missing, he didn’t know where to look. He thought they must have been lost in the move or maybe stolen.
A decade passed. The bank turned the coins over to Virginia, and the treasury — which has only so much storage for physical property — prepared them for public auction. (The proceeds of such sales remain on the books, however, in case the claimants come forward.)
With the auction approaching, treasury staff consulted the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in a last-ditch effort to find the owner. A museum curator — who identified all but two of the coins as genuine Byzantine currency and set their value at $200,000 or more — checked with dealers and auction houses, whose records eventually led to one very happy owner.
“Even more than the value of the coins to me is the restoration, to some degree, in humanity,” the coin collector told NBC 12. (Shaban said the collector used a pseudonym during the news report because he wanted to remain anonymous.)
DeFriese, the director of the Newport News homeless shelter, said the mission’s benefactor was almost as mysterious. Long after the six-figure check arrived in October, DeFriese and other mission staff wondered who this James A. Moir was and why he had left money to the shelter. All they knew was that Moir, of Williamsburg, died in 2001.
Then DeFriese, while going through the mission’s records recently, found a registration card Moir had filled out. The card showed that the Navy veteran, then 61 and a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., spent three months in 1981 in rehab at the shelter. His posthumous gift now looked like a gesture of thanks for the mission’s help.
“It could have saved his life,” DeFriese said. “And that’s a really cool thing.”
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