Scraping unclaimed property, i scraped $360,000,000 in 15 incomplete days

charlesmartel said:
...There are also people who scan the database and mail out letters to people with the funds telling them they will help get the funds back for a fee. ....
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For those that missed it.... CM is telling you this has been going on offline for decades.

In a twist, people also do it with land tax auctions for the amount paid at auction for amount bid over tax due - in a twist on that the unscrupulous get a deed signed over and keep the extra. The tax auction angle is not advisable for obvious reasons.
 


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Ok I've gone back and read this twice now and I still don't understand.

People die.
Some of those people have life insurance policies.
Banks try to find people who know the people that died and had insurance policies.
If they cant find them, the state gets the money?

Is this correct?
 
Enigmabomb said:
Ok I've gone back and read this twice now and I still don't understand.

People die.
Some of those people have life insurance policies.
Banks try to find people who know the people that died and had insurance policies.
If they cant find them, the state gets the money?

Is this correct?
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Nope. Here's what the state's site says:

The State of California is currently in possession of more than $6.9 billion in Unclaimed Property belonging to approximately 24.9 million individuals and organizations.

The State acquires unclaimed property through California's Unclaimed Property Law, which requires "holders" such as corporations, business associations, financial institutions, and insurance companies to annually report and deliver property to the Controller's Office after there has been no customer contact for three years. Often the owner forgets that the account exists, or moves and does not leave a forwarding address or the forwarding order expires. In some cases, the owner dies and the heirs have no knowledge of the property.
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You just have to not have some form of customer contact with the financial institution for the money, assets, etc to be transferred over to the state. It happens to a lot of people. Most are alive from what I can tell. They just don't open their statements or whatever. You can't just put money in a bank account in CA and forget about it. If you do, it will get transferred to the state.
 
Enigmabomb said:
Alright, and so there is a grace period where these people can say, "Hold the fuck on hombre...." and get their money back?
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The institutions have to send out letters notifying you before transferring the money to the state. The problem is that a lot of people just assume their bank statements contain the usual info and discard them.

You can get your money back after filling out a form and waiting some time. You can also check the state website to see if they have seized any of your funds. They also seize safety box contents, so if you have something to hide it's best not to put them there.

Here's the search link:

https://ucpi.sco.ca.gov/UCP/Default.aspx
 
Enigmabomb said:
Alright, and so there is a grace period where these people can say, "Hold the fuck on hombre...." and get their money back?
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It's bigger than just life insurance.

It is all escheated funds from bank accounts, dividend checks, unclaimed stock shares that resulted in varied circumstances that self directed/investors do not know about, safe deposit box contents, uncashed escrow checks, rebates, and on and on goes the list.
 
The State of California is currently in possession of more than $6.9 billion in Unclaimed Property belonging to approximately 24.9 million individuals and organizations.
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Lol yeah right. More like there is an IOU for $6.9 billion in a filing cabinet somewhere in Sacramento.
 
Whoa. Learn a new thing every day. That's insane that there are piles of "unclaimed cash" like this. So I guess to simplify things in a very "old meme way":

1. Scrape data of unclaimed funds
2. Contact rightful owners about possibility of retrieving said funds via Facebook
3. Collect fee for "helping" rightful owner to find and collect these funds
4. ???
5. Profit

Unless I completely misunderstood things, this sounds pretty smart. Would be interesting to test this out in one State first, like OP mentions, and see how it could work, then scale out.
 
charlesmartel said:
You can get your money back after filling out a form and waiting some time. You can also check the state website to see if they have seized any of your funds. They also seize safety box contents, so if you have something to hide it's best not to put them there.

Here's the search link:

https://ucpi.sco.ca.gov/UCP/Default.aspx
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Now there is a MONSTER business.

Get a list of property that has already been seized by the state (if possible) and search out the real owners and show them how to get it back (quite possibly with an ebook) = $$$$$$
 
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use facebook or youre doing it wrong. someone else is gonna have to make the uk version im not into it right now. ive checked some of the other states, every one of them is different, there are some sites that claim to have it all, that is unlikely considering the volume of new entries made daily. i didnt check, but all of those sites look super n00b
 
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