Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks

http://angrystatistician.blogspot.com/2013/02/sergey-brin-please-pick-up-your.html

by octonion • 13 years ago

220 84 13 years ago

angrystatistician.blogspot.com

octonion9• 13 years ago

The state of California is holding over $6 billion in unclaimed property. The search engine doesn't even do fuzzy string matching.

ineedtosleep• 13 years ago

Also note that:

    Due to the large volume of claims we receive and process,
    it may take up to 180 days to process your claim.

octonion9• 13 years ago

Wow, 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.

jconley3• 13 years ago

When 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• 13 years ago

State of New York search: https://ouf.osc.state.ny.us/

DrJ2• 13 years ago

seems to be down/

numair• 13 years ago

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-03-08/news/020308001...

Ahhh, memories! Almost worth leaving the money unclaimed.

octonion9• 13 years ago

My new employer was owed nearly $23000. Hopefully that gains me some good karma.

slashclee• 13 years ago

I wonder what kinds of safeguards they have in place to prevent people with the same name from claiming each other's things.

jyap• 13 years ago

You need to enter in your SSN/Tax ID/FEIN.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

Well 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?propertyRe....

Could you just claim that against your own ID?

ComputerGuru• 13 years ago

Is 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/

redegg• 13 years ago

Property tax searches are a great way to DOX someone, btw.

robinh2• 13 years ago

DOX?

kalleboo• 13 years ago

In Sweden, tax records are public information, so every year around tax time, tabloids will print long lists of names of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood". Compared to that, this is nothing.

jack-r-abbit2• 13 years ago

It is also creepy that you can just keep incrementing the property id in the URL and churn through the results.

citricsquid• 13 years ago

Are there any companies that will monitor states unclaimed property and retrieve it for a commission?

peter_tonoli2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Surprised this is the #1 story on HN...

James_Duval• 13 years ago

There's a lot of data in there. Some of it is going to be interesting. Some might even be useful!

lbraasch• 13 years ago

Heh. $24 from a Washington Mutual free checking account. Surely would have paid that in fees had I agreed to become a Chase member.

saundby• 13 years ago

My 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• 13 years ago

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

I bet this guy made keyboards.

danboarder• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

I 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/1133311/0000950138010...

jeremycole• 13 years ago

Yahoo and Google are both owed pretty large amounts, e.g.:

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

tricolon• 13 years ago

This might be a goldmine for genealogical research...

gojomo2• 13 years ago

A "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?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• 13 years ago

The address, 2101 WAVERLY ST PALO ALTO, does indeed confirm this is the late Steve Jobs.

octonion9• 13 years ago

Linus Torvalds is owed about $250, e.g. http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

suyash3• 13 years ago

The 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.

rug• 13 years ago

No joke I just found 100 bucks, thanks!

Mithrandir• 13 years ago

Apparently, Barack Obama has $250 in unclaimed cashier's checks from First Republic Bank: 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?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?propertyRe...

Edit 2: Hmm, looks like Jesus Christ has some unclaimed property too: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

So I guess some of this is people using fake names.

octonion9• 13 years ago

I'm guessing this person doesn't want the money back: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

frogpelt• 13 years ago

And you found that how?

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

Kartificial• 13 years ago

Funny, just found out that distant family overseas is owed over $1000, not bad :)

petercooper• 13 years ago

Maybe 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• 13 years ago

California 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

[2] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=ccp...

DrJ2• 13 years ago

@_@ I just found a check for my self from a former employer.

znowi• 13 years ago

Arnie has yet to claim $0.15 http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

octonion9• 13 years ago

Netzero owes OJ Simpson $10: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

octonion9• 13 years ago

I just found someone who has over $50000 coming to them. Unusual name, so they were easy to locate on LinkedIn and Facebook.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

A 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_tonoli2• 13 years ago

The Australian version - https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/find-uncla...

RileyJames• 13 years ago

There 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• 13 years ago

Haha, Mark Zuckerberg (and Randi too) have a couple on there as well.

imrehg• 13 years ago

Haha, found $7.66 for a friend on the first search. :)

CodeCube2• 13 years ago

Hah, I looked up the Florida equivalent of this unclaimed property lookup/site, and it's humorously located at https://www.fltreasurehunt.org

Looks like I had some unclaimed cash in lieu of shares from a previous employer. Claimed!

shawndumas• 13 years ago

that site seems sketchy as all get out...

CodeCube2• 13 years ago

Yeah, 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/), and even in the local media as legit (ie. 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• 13 years ago

A 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-abbit2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

When 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• 13 years ago

Only 5%? That's cheap... you should have taken the fee model from collection agencies, and taken 20%+.

CaveTech• 13 years ago

Except 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.

suyash3• 13 years ago

@Author: Thanks buddy, I didn't find anything for myself but some of my family members need to collect their check :)

suyash3• 13 years ago

For the State of Michigan: http://www.michigan.gov/treasury/0,1607,7-121-44435_57506---...

jconley3• 13 years ago

I 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.

jconley3• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

It 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• 13 years ago

Ha, 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• 13 years ago

I'm owed $60! First round's on me.

akvlad• 13 years ago

New York state has $12 Billion in unclaimed money! None of it belongs to me though. http://www.osc.state.ny.us/ouf/index.htm

salgernon• 13 years ago

I really have no idea why my cat is owed $5.98 by Ace Hardware:

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

The address they have is correct.

octonion9• 13 years ago

I'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• 13 years ago

I skimmed a few other states for relatives and found several hundred dollars. Thanks!

octonion9• 13 years ago

The results of mining the first 3.5 million records - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5255962

Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks

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