Couples good luck rewarded with JAIL TIME

Even if the suitcase wasn't being looked after for a "friend" I know of no one who would store that kind of amount of money in such a manner . Something fishy has gone on almost for certain the suitcase was probably have to been sold to someone else in particular who would continue the process of moving the payment of the cash for some illegal activity .

reply to post by Retrovertigo


Your notion is completely impractical its like saying that they brought the suitcase but not the lining inside .

Originally posted by xpert11
Your notion is completely impractical its like saying that they brought the suitcase but not the lining inside .

That may or may not be the case, however that is irrelevant...Theft by finding is law, said law was broken in a big way, flanny wearing bogans are in jail and off the streets..

Everyone wins

As someone who has found several handbags and wallets over the years and returned them intact to their owners, I have no problems whatsoever with this law...

Whether they were entitled to their new found fortune or not, they should have at least tried to locate the original owners of such a large sum of money.

I think that the right thing to do would be to return this couple their life savings. Even if it was a case of stupidity on their part. If it were me in this situation, I don't think that I could have kept their money, and still maintained a clear conscience. I think that guilt would have gotten the better of me.

Originally posted by collector60490
reply to post by eNumbra

 

In this country (USA) anyone who finds that kind of money and reports it will immediately have it taken by police who will declare it to be "drug money" and therefore property of the state. If you find a measly 5,000.00 though and tell police they will hold it for a period of time, usually 30-60 days, and if no one claims it they give it back to you free and clear. Australia clearly has different laws regarding found property.
If you were going to be dishonest and not report the money the best thing to do would be to stash it somewhere away from your home and when asked about the suitcase simply claim, "I don't know what you're talking about! There is no money in that case!" then let police sort through it. They would not be able to prove you did find the money. How many people handled that case at the Salvations Army before it was purchased? Any one of them could have taken it. Or, and this is the most likely scenario, the money was NEVER there in the first place! After all, who would stash that kind of money in the lining of an old suitcase??? In a few months the heat would be totally off.

This is untrue.

If you find a $10 that you put in your coat pocket 6 months ago and forgot about, does that have to be reported and handed in? Of course not.

If you find money that is not yours then the above is true, but where it is an attribute of property that you have clear and fair title to then it would not need to be reported.

The couple had purchased the suitcase and had gained full and fair title to it. The money is merely an attribute of property which was already theirs.

If the couple had purchased the suitcase "as is" and it had contained a deadly redback spider instead of $100,000, could the subsequential widow have sued the first couple for a lifetime of lost earnings due to the resulting death of her husband at the jaws of the spider?

The answer of course is NO.

When purchasing property, all liability and rights are transferred.

A couple of years ago, I bought a piece of property in Detroit, originally valued at $60,000 for a meagre $900 as the owner was hard=up. If he discovered tha the had not been as hard-up as he had thought because his accountant had made an error, making the property rightfully worth more due to his actual lack of indebtedness, could he sue me for the lost asset value of $59,100? Of course not.

When purchasing property, all liability and rights are transferred.

This case boils down to CAVE EMPTOR.


[edit on 9-4-2010 by abcdef]

Originally posted by Isosceles
Whether they were entitled to their new found fortune or not, they should have at least tried to locate the original owners of such a large sum of money.

I think that the right thing to do would be to return this couple their life savings. Even if it was a case of stupidity on their part. If it were me in this situation, I don't think that I could have kept their money, and still maintained a clear conscience. I think that guilt would have gotten the better of me.

Suppose they had returned the money to the first couple and it had turned out that some idiot at the Salvation Army had made a mistake and put their monthly shop takings in the wrong suitcase with the intent to take it to the bank, then they would have wrongfully have enriched the first couple with money that had never been theirs. What justice or morality is there in that?

The purchasing couple had a contract with the Salvation Army and none other.

Alternatively, maybe the money had fallen out of someone else's luggage and slid into that suitcase from someone else's on a British Overseas Air Service to Rio De Janeiro in 1956 and has been passed around for 64 years without being noticed. Would the couple then have a moral obligation to employ Pinkertons at a cost of, say, $2million or so, to track down the original owners from 1956 to give them back their $100,000?

Of course not, their sole contract was with the Salvation Army.

Originally posted by xpert11
Even if the suitcase wasn't being looked after for a "friend" I know of no one who would store that kind of amount of money in such a manner . .

Maybe you don't, but I do. How about...

- An investor who had most of their life savings invested in Lehman Brothers - once bitten, twice shy.
- An honest Thai Government official who had just resigned and taken all the cash out the bank before the country falls to the rioters.
- A Scriptophilists who collects antique bank notes.
- Someone with no bank account who had just inherited a box held at a lawyers from an aged aunt.
- A department store owner in an isolated town in the outback of Australia who had not managed to get to the bank before it closed and found that the night safe was jammed.
- A bankrupt, prohibited from holding a bank account or any form of savings account and prohibited from holding assets, wins on a $1 accumulator bet at a bookmakers. Barry Curl in Ireland did exactly that, so why shouldn't others?
- An avid supporter of Above Top Secret who lives in some Third World surveillance society Big Brother state like Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia, Iraq or the UK who does not want his every moves noted and tagged by the state and so tries not tio use banks or credit cards.

Also, consider...
- I used to work at a wallpaper distributor in the UK where we used to have one type of border that consisted of what looked like a run of $1 and $10 bills in a strip to go around the top edge of the wallpaper. It was so expensive that my boss and I calculated that it would have been cheaper to have bought and supplied customers with real banknotes instead of the printed border.
- In the hyper-inflation days of the Weimar, there was a case of some guy who had to take a laundry basket to work to collect his salary for the week. On his way back home, he stopped to look in a shop window, only to find that when he looked back again, someone had tipped the banknotes out onto the ground and stolen his laundry basket. Maybe in six months time, if the world economy is not righted, that suit case might well be worth more than the cash.



[edit on 9-4-2010 by abcdef]

Originally posted by abcdef
An investor who had most of their life savings invested in Lehman Brothers - once bitten, twice shy.

If the guy has that kind of money left over he hasn't been bitten to hard . Anybody dumb enough not secure the money somehow if it isn't in the bank deserves to lose it. I could swallow that it was someone who took part in a bank run during the Great Depression but they are all but gone now .

- An honest Thai Government official who had just resigned and taken all the cash out the bank before the country falls to the rioters.

More likely to be a corrupt official looking to steal or launder the money.

A Scriptophilists who collects antique bank notes.

That is the most plausible explanation you have come up with .
If that is the case then the police involvement is really strange indeed .
A Scriptophilists is a collector of old currency correct ?

Someone with no bank account who had just inherited a box held at a lawyers from an aged aunt.

Someone being around without having a bank account even if its say in a false name seems rather unlikely what with electronic bank transfer being the likes of the way wages e.t.c are paid today.

A department store owner in an isolated town in the outback of Australia who had not managed to get to the bank before it closed and found that the night safe was jammed.

Sure but why not take the cash to the bank the next day ?
In that case the money should be missing on the company books .

A bankrupt, prohibited from holding a bank account or any form of savings account and prohibited from holding assets, wins on a $1 accumulator bet at a bookmakers.

Well if that is the case I hope the person didn't stash all there money in the same place . Its seems odd that the person would let suitcase get lost so easily unless he/she is deceased .

I guess that makes OUR governments criminals too, because they always somehow manage to find BILLIONS to either bail themselves out of a banking crisis, or fund yet another multi-billion Black-Project (which non of the paying project will even get to see nevermind read about in the papers.)

This is a very sad case indeed. This go's to show you how greedy humanity really is. Here we are, fighting over money that has nothing to do with us. The right thing to do in this situation was bring the money to the police and follow-up until the rightful owner turned up. If the owner did not claim the money within a reasonable time than you may keep it.

This is precisely why we have poverty, money rules and subdues the world. People don't care about each other one bit. What if that money was needed for a much needed operation? I understand it probably wasn't, but I'm just sayin'.

wow, that sucks! They BOUGHT the suitcase..how is that theft? They paid money for it. I would hate to loose that kind of money, but man, wtf are you doing lining it in a suitcase and then donating it? The person should just be SOL.
I can't believe these people are being charged! I hope a good lawyer can help them out.

What ever happened to "finders, keepers" or "possession is nine tenths of the law"?

The take away lesson here is never deposit money you find.

I wonder what the lower limit of prosecution is for "theft by finding"? I mean, I find pennies, quarters, etc. all the time. I found $100 bill once...found $7 in a grocery store parking lot the other day...will they come gunning for me?

What are you suppose to do when you find $$$? Turn it over to the cops? Yeah right....then they would just keep it.

We were taught as small children that if you find any amount of money on the street (or anywhere else) that it is to be turned in and reported to the police as found money. If, after 30 days, no one has come to claim the exact amount of money (or can identify the lost location) then the finder is given the entire amount.

Don't know if those laws have been changed or not because at some point I figured out that if it doesn't come with an ID (wallet, etc.) then stick it in your pocket and keep your mouth shut about it.

Isn't the question one of intent?

Usually when we think of stealing we think of one person intentionally taking another's property. Here the property was given away and then happened into the hands of another party who innocently bought the outside container in which the money was housed.

Where's the intent to steal? Where's the taking?

I think the real problem is the fact that the law is here mandating an affirmative duty.

Law traditionally imposed only a negative duty on each of us. For example: DON'T beat other people over the head, DON'T drive drunk, DON'T break into people's homes. Here it's a positive duty: Provide all money which you find to the authorities/original owner or you will be punished.

Now, ethically, there's no question. The right thing to do would be to find the people who lost it and give it back to them. But legally, it's something quite different. When you start punishing people for NOT doing something you begin to tread on very thin ice. You start imposing your ETHICS over the FREEDOM of others.

The cops could have just taken the money and given it back to the original owners (there's a definite ownership dispute possible there), I would have been fine with that. No harm done. No harm has been done. No one's lost property, no one's physically hurt. But to take the money and punish the people who took it with a crime when NO ONE WAS HARMED is wrong.






[edit on 15-4-2010 by Cincinnatus]