8 ms·
Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- octonion 14y agoThe state of California is holding over $6 billion in unclaimed property. The search engine doesn't even do fuzzy string matching.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ineedtosleep 14y agoAlso note that: Due to the large volume of claims we receive and process, it may take up to 180 days to process your claim.
- octonion 14y agoWow, that's insane. Spending $50m/year to notify people and process these claims could easily be justified given the sheer size of the assets being held.
- jconley 14y agoWhen we wrote this software, we tried hard to get a follow on contract to fix this 180 day problem using more automation. But, there was no budget, and the claims processors did not want to lose their jobs. We toured the location where they process the claims. They literally had piles of filing boxes containing the submitted claim forms in a secured room. I forget how many they do per day, but I remember being surprised at the volume. The site does many millions of searches per month...
- niggler 14y agoState of New York search: https://ouf.osc.state.ny.us/ https://ouf.osc.state.ny.us/
- DrJ 14y agoseems to be down/
- numair 14y agohttp://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=5460540 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-08/news/0203080017_1_web-sites-recording-academy-music-files http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-08/news/020308001... Ahhh, memories! Almost worth leaving the money unclaimed.
- octonion 14y agoMy new employer was owed nearly $23000. Hopefully that gains me some good karma.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- slashclee 14y agoI wonder what kinds of safeguards they have in place to prevent people with the same name from claiming each other's things.
- jyap 14y agoYou need to enter in your SSN/Tax ID/FEIN.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoWell are their fake SSNs or other ID numbers because I'd doubt that Ms. Asdf Asdf (of CA 90210) has a genuine government ID number, http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=13165179 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe.... Could you just claim that against your own ID?
- ComputerGuru 14y agoIs it just me, or is it really creepy that anyone can dig up this sort of info about your income/pension/insurance/etc? Illinois' search is no better, but it does not display dollar amount details: https://icash.illinois.gov/ https://icash.illinois.gov/
- redegg 14y agoProperty tax searches are a great way to DOX someone, btw.
- robinh 14y agoDOX?
- mrfairladyz 14y agoTo find and release publicly personal information about someone -- name, address, phone number, and even SSN and credit card numbers -- in such away that they become identifiable to just about anyone online. This was a hot topic a few months back when reddit had to deal with it: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/10/truth-lies-doxxing-internet-vigilanteism/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/10/truth-lies-doxxing-inte...
- KevinWaller 14y agoIs there a time limit on making claims? If they do expire, where does the money go? This money could (and should) make a huge difference to the lives of the public.
- citricsquid 14y agoAre there any companies that will monitor states unclaimed property and retrieve it for a commission?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- peter_tonoli 14y agoI had a small amount of money in a bank account that I found in the Australian version; not long after I claimed it, I received a letter from 2 solicitors saying that I had unclaimed money (although they wouldn't say where from) that they could help me retrieve for a fee.
- edouard1234567 14y agoSurprised this is the #1 story on HN...
- James_Duval 14y agoThere's a lot of data in there. Some of it is going to be interesting. Some might even be useful!
- lbraasch 14y agoHeh. $24 from a Washington Mutual free checking account. Surely would have paid that in fees had I agreed to become a Chase member.
- saundby 14y agoMy nephew has $0.26 coming to him. I wonder if he'll track down a notary for the form that will charge less. Next question is: drive in the form or mail it? ;)
- floaters 14y agohttp://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=13165179 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... I bet this guy made keyboards.
- danboarder 14y agoI have lived in several states including CA and found four claims for myself in the CA system due to forgotten accounts from prior addresses, here are a few that might be typical examples of what is being held in this program: 1. Pacific Bell Telephone Company $72.24 2. Verisign (SSL or domain payments) $73.50 3. 20 shares of TravelZoo stock ~$400.00 value? That TravelZoo stock was from back in the crazy/genius dotcom days when they gave out free stock for email referrals and sign ups. :) They did something right since they are still in business. I do appreciate this program as these were my oversight/losses, things I had forgotten. However the process to place claims is a bit of a hassle: I need to physically print out forms, include copies of ID, etc. I'll write up a blog post of the process of claiming it when it's all said and done.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoI cannot believe the "SEC has not asserted any violation of law by Travelzoo" for "the first offering of 'free shares' over the Internet" [1]. Technically, only a registered broker-dealer agent is allowed to transact shares, and never at a price unrelated to the market. [1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1133311/000095013801000034/0000950138-01-000034-0007.pdf http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1133311/0000950138010...
- jeremycole 14y agoYahoo and Google are both owed pretty large amounts, e.g.: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=23031627 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=22521713 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tricolon 14y agoThis might be a goldmine for genealogical research...
- gojomo 14y agoA "Steven [P] Jobs", of Palo Alto and Woodside, has a bunch of small insurance, share, and dividend amounts due, including for example: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/NoticeDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=180364 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/NoticeDetails.aspx?propertyRecI... I suppose Oracle Shareowner Services has had a hard time reaching this reclusive character since their last reported contact date of "10/2/2008".
- 10dpd 14y agoThe address, 2101 WAVERLY ST PALO ALTO, does indeed confirm this is the late Steve Jobs.
- octonion 14y agoLinus Torvalds is owed about $250, e.g. http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=9787749 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- meritt 14y agoI live by Linus, want me to walk over there and let him know?
- suyash 14y agoThe problem with Celebrities is that they have multiple homes and travel so much that you still can't confirm they live there at the moment.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rug 14y agoNo joke I just found 100 bucks, thanks!
- Mithrandir 14y agoApparently, Barack Obama has $250 in unclaimed cashier's checks from First Republic Bank: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=22491183 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... Also, looks like Woz hasn't claimed his $5.61 from Apple yet: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=6139496 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... Edit: Related to an article posted earlier about John Draper/Cap'n Crunch, looks like he has some property to claim too: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=18967064 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=10016961 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... Edit 2: Hmm, looks like Jesus Christ has some unclaimed property too: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=22644738 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=20802355 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=7485039 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... So I guess some of this is people using fake names.
- octonion 14y agoI'm guessing this person doesn't want the money back: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=19287386 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- frogpelt 14y agoAnd you found that how?
- chris_mahan 14y agomight be related to http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=19287382 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- Kartificial 14y agoFunny, just found out that distant family overseas is owed over $1000, not bad :)
- petercooper 14y agoMaybe they could enact a law that allows them to take ownership of unclaimed property after a certain amount of time? It seems to work that way for abandoned storage units, lost property at airports, etc.
- starnixgod 14y agoCalifornia does have escheat[1] laws which deal with unclaimed property and how the state handles situations where no rightful owner comes forward to claim.[2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat [2] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=ccp&group=01001-02000&file=1300-1301 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=ccp...
- DrJ 14y ago@_@ I just found a check for my self from a former employer.
- znowi 14y agoArnie has yet to claim $0.15 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=19234458 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- octonion 14y agoNetzero owes OJ Simpson $10: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=22965850 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...
- octonion 14y agoI just found someone who has over $50000 coming to them. Unusual name, so they were easy to locate on LinkedIn and Facebook.
- tokenadult 14y agoA very interesting blog post. The key idea is here: "Programmer and database types will notice one problem immediately - no fuzzy string matching. If your name or address was misspelled on the assets, or munged in the recording process, tracking down any assets belonging to you could become a difficult to impossible process. Given that this database has at most 18 million rows, there's no excuse for such a basic (and important) feature to be missing." A lot of government databases could improve usability enormously by implementing that suggestion.
- peter_tonoli 14y agoThe Australian version - https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/find-unclaimed-money/unclaimed-money-search https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/find-uncla...
- RileyJames 14y agoThere are plenty of businesses out there that find money for people on commission. I just always thought they were some sort of dodge, sounds like there is some merit to it.
- javanix 14y agoHaha, Mark Zuckerberg (and Randi too) have a couple on there as well.
- imrehg 14y agoHaha, found $7.66 for a friend on the first search. :)
- CodeCube 14y agoHah, I looked up the Florida equivalent of this unclaimed property lookup/site, and it's humorously located at https://www.fltreasurehunt.org https://www.fltreasurehunt.org Looks like I had some unclaimed cash in lieu of shares from a previous employer. Claimed!
- shawndumas 14y agothat site seems sketchy as all get out...
- CodeCube 14y agoYeah, I agree it looks that way ... I thought it was a scammy site at first, but you can find it referenced on other sites (http://www.fltreasury.org/ http://www.fltreasury.org/), and even in the local media as legit (ie. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2003-07-11/news/0307100370_1_sharon-richardson-dear-greg-whirlpool http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2003-07-11/news/03071003...). So unless this is a really well orchestrated scam, it's real as far as I can tell.
- sailfast 14y agoA couple of states seemed to have outsourced this (Ohio, most notably) to another site - missingmoney.com. When searching for first and last names it returned likely matches as well, so perhaps they've implemented some fuzzy string matching along the way that will help citizens find what's owed. Side note: As a result of this article I found >100 bucks owed to family members which will be a great boon to them. Thanks for posting.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoI have $0.11 to claim. But since I would have to mail the signed documents in, at a cost of $0.45, I think I'll just let it go. :)
- glaugh 14y agoWhen I was in college I spent a summer going through Alaska's database (it was downloadable), cross referencing with a people search engine, and then mailing letters to people to tell them that they had missing money and how to claim it (and asking for a 5% cut). Made a decent summer's wage. Pretty sure I could have made a ton more money but it was pretty boring work so I just focused on school and more professional internships after that. Still, an opportunity for someone feeling entrepreneurial out there.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoOnly 5%? That's cheap... you should have taken the fee model from collection agencies, and taken 20%+.
- CaveTech 14y agoExcept for the fact that the receiver is getting a letter in the mail from someone they've never met informing them that they are owed money. Pretty much screams scam, even though it isn't in this instance.
- rgovind 14y agoSomeone here should be easily able to implement the following Use linkedin/Facebook API to get names of all friends/contacts who live in California and then search for their names in the data base. If found, report amount owed!! Edit: If you want to collaborate with me on this, ping me. Email in profile.
- suyash 14y ago@Author: Thanks buddy, I didn't find anything for myself but some of my family members need to collect their check :)
- suyash 14y agoFor the State of Michigan: http://www.michigan.gov/treasury/0,1607,7-121-44435_57506---,00.html http://www.michigan.gov/treasury/0,1607,7-121-44435_57506---...
- jconley 14y agoI wrote most of this app on a contract nearly 10 years ago. We used it as a mentorship exercise to train state worker programmers in the SCO department on the (then new) ASP.NET Framework and SQL Server 2000. The DBA was familiar with Oracle and mainframes, but not SQL Server. It was written in ASP.NET 1.1 and used SQL Server 2000. From what I can tell it hasn't changed much at all. "Programmer and database types will notice one problem immediately - no fuzzy string matching." Yeah, I really wanted to implement that. The problem was we had to use Microsoft SQL Server and no third party database/indexing systems. SQL Server's Full Text Indexing run took too long during the nightly import job on year 2000 commodity hardware. We also had to do all of this within the constraints of training state workers and handing off something they could actually maintain. Ah, the joys of state contracting.
- jconley 14y agoI see there are plenty of posts down below that are complaining about the lack of fuzzy search. By all means, crawl the site and create a better search engine. IIRC it is setup in such a way that new records are always appended at the end of the ID space. Just check every night for new things. At the time we wrote this there were a few companies doing just that, charging a small fee, and soliciting people that were owed large sums. I mean, you've got a $6B market, in just California, to play with where you could probably earn 5% or more as a finders fee to those that don't know this is public record, or might just pay you to avoid the hassle of the paperwork. There was also a web service interface to this system that returned paged results as plain ole XML, but unfortunately I don't remember the URL. We had wanted to expand and create an interstate network by partnering with Texas and some others, but it never panned out for reasons I forget.
- ratsbane 14y agoIt is really nice to have the original author show up and comment on something like this. After looking at this site I started thinking about ways of crawling the whole database. The 500-record limit would make an alphabet tree crawl a bit more challenging but not too bad. Do you think the state agency would be amenable to requests for bulk download? [edit] just saw your post which answered most of my questions while I was typing them.
- jeremyarussell 14y agoHa, 99 stores owes me 39 dollars. I'd rather them send it to the red cross or something. I wasn't even expecting there to be anything either. shrugs
- outside1234 14y agoI'm owed $60! First round's on me.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- akvlad 14y agoNew York state has $12 Billion in unclaimed money! None of it belongs to me though. http://www.osc.state.ny.us/ouf/index.htm http://www.osc.state.ny.us/ouf/index.htm
- salgernon 14y agoI really have no idea why my cat is owed $5.98 by Ace Hardware: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRecID=23168305 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe... The address they have is correct.
- octonion 14y agoI'm scraping the entire database. The largest amount I've found so far is $1.4m - I've sent her a message on Facebook.
- kingnothing 14y agoI skimmed a few other states for relatives and found several hundred dollars. Thanks!
- octonion 14y agoThe results of mining the first 3.5 million records - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5255962 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5255962