Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers

What happens when you find something that is not yours? Does this playground idiom apply to our current society?

If you found a lottery ticket on the floor and you ended up winning the lottery, would it be considered your money or would you be stealing? This is what happened to a couple who found a lottery ticket on the floor of a supermarket that was worth £30,000. They were given a suspended sentence of almost a year in jail after the lottery ticket’s owner came forward. In situations like this, where is the line drawn between finding and stealing? An expert in law from King’s College London believes that the “person who lost it still had a right to have it returned”.

However, others believe that the saying “finders keepers, losers weepers” does really apply to our current society. For example, there was a case where a man hid $500,000 in the walls of his house before he died. His daughters knew he had a habit of doing these kind of things and searched his house before selling it but did not find anything. A while later, the new owners renovated the house and found the money in the wall. They argued that the money was abandoned and it theirs as they bought the house. Once the man’s daughters heard and came to claim the money. The case went to court with the daughters winning their money back. On another day in another courthouse, the case could have had a very different ending as cases like this are very messy and complicated, especially when more than one party is fighting for the claim.

There are various laws regarding lost property and if you can keep it. For instance, if lost property is found to be worth more than $100 in California, the property will have to be turned over to the authorities. If nobody comes to claim the lost property after 90 days, the finder is able to keep the lost property. The time needed for the finder to claim the lost property after handing it in varies from place to place such as in the UK, where finders only have to wait a month. The law differs in specific situations. One example is, according to the British Museum, if lost property such as antique money is found, finders have to report their findings to the authorities.

It is clear that various cases can be handled very differently depending on each situation. If you found a dollar on the street, it would be realistic for you to believe that it there would not be a chance of finding the owner of the dollar. However, if you found a lost property in a shop, it will be easier to try to find the owner of the lost property rather than just keeping it.

In the end, you should try your best to return the lost property back to its owner as it is rightfully theirs. In certain situations, you may even be able to keep the lost property if the owner does not come forward. The most important point is that you took the morally right steps to keep the property. Next time you stumble across lost property, what would you do?

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Written by Victoria Yu

References: PodcastOne. (2018, November 19). Finders Keepers: Real Law. Retrieved December 28, 2018, from https:// www.podcastone.com/episode/Finders-Keepers-Real-Law

MailOnline, G. S. (2009, April 16). Fraud couple who found £30k lottery ticket on supermarket floor went on spending spree. Retrieved December 28, 2018, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1170467/ Fraud-couple-30k-lottery-ticket-supermarket-floor-went-spending-spree.html

Meyer, H. (2013, November 21). Does finders keepers stand up legally when you come across some cash? Retrieved December 28, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2013/nov/20/finders- keepers-legal-position

Steinmetz, K. (2014, February 26). Couple Finds Gold Coins: When Finders-Keepers Is Legally Sound. Retrieved December 28, 2018, from http://time.com/10118/california-gold-coins-finders-keepers-john- mary/