#VALUABLE COINS IN YOUR HOUSE FULL#

If a diver off the Florida coast happens upon a sunken ship with a trunk full of galleons, for instance, that might yield a legal battle among the finder and the state, descendants of the ship’s owners and any insurance company that paid a claim when the ship went down. And cases can get much more complicated, especially when more than two parties are staking a claim. An appellate court determined in 2012 that the funds were mislaid-having been intentionally put there, not unintentionally lost or thrown away-and awarded the money to the daughters.Ī different court could have come to a different conclusion, of course. But as soon as the heirs found out about the stash they staked their own claim. The new owners said the money should come with the house, that it had essentially been abandoned. Years later, the new owners hired a contractor to renovate the house and he discovered the cans, hidden behind a wall-mounted toaster oven. The man’s daughters, knowing he had a penchant for stashing things away, searched the house after he died before selling it to new owners. Abandoned property and lost property are more likely to be dealt with by the easy “finder-keepers” edict.Īn Arizona case, in which a man died after having hidden $500,000 in ammunition cans in his walls, helps illustrate the distinction.

Mislaid property, Orth says, is supposed to be safeguarded by whoever owns the property where it was mislaid until someone with a better claim, like the bank customer, comes back. And mislaid property is intentionally put somewhere-like money on a bank counter that a customer intends to deposit-but then forgotten. Lost property, like an engagement ring accidentally dropped in the street, is something that is inadvertently, unknowingly left behind. Abandoned property is something forsaken by a previous owner, who has no intention of returning for it. Orth says it’s rare for cities or states to make any claim to found property, like the goods that metal-detector-wielding treasure hunters find on public beaches, unless it has some historical or archeological significance.Ī legal distinction that often comes to bear is whether property is abandoned, lost or mislaid. Authorities must then wait 90 days, advertise the lost property for a week, and finally release it to the person who found it if no one could prove ownership. In California, there is a law mandating that any found property valued over $100 be turned over to police.

But what if someone stumbles across something valuable on public property? Say a San Franciscan strolling across the Golden Gate Bridge finds a bag containing $1 million in cash. If John and Mary had found the coins while taking a walk on someone else’s property, the booty would likely go to that landowner. “When you buy something, normally you get anything that’s been hidden in it,” says Orth, offering the example of a man who bought a used car for $600 and gets to keep $10,000 he finds in the trunk. Even if someone could prove that their great-great-grandfather buried those cans, there’s likely little the descendant could do if their grandfather sold that land to John and Mary’s family. In the case of “John and Mary” (as they’re being called) and their California coins, the strongest factor in their favor is that they found the coins on their own property.

Generally, “the finder of lost property can keep it against all the world… qualified by the question of where it was found,” says property law expert John Orth, a professor at the University of North Carolina.

Valuable coins in your house