A Walmart shopper in Albany, Georgia, picked up $30 that someone else had dropped on the floor. What followed was considerably more complicated than finding $30 usually is.
The Albany Police Department posted a surveillance image on Facebook on August 18, asking the public to help identify the man who picked up the cash.
Police said another shopper had dropped the $30 while shopping at Walmart. The man pictured in the post picked it up but did not turn it over to store employees, according to the department.
It was enough to start a police search, a spirited public reconsideration of every dollar bill ever found on a sidewalk, and a practical question: Isn’t this what “finders keepers” is for?
A Quick Pickup
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Police kept their description of the incident brief.
“An individual dropped $30.00 on the ground while shopping,” the department said. “This individual picked up the money and did not turn it in to the employees.”
The department asked anyone who could identify the man to contact Albany police.
The amount involved made the request unusual enough to spread well beyond Albany. Local 12 reported on the search Sunday, while the police post drew responses from people suddenly concerned about their own histories with unattended currency.
But buried underneath the jokes was a reasonable question. If someone finds loose cash with no wallet or identification attached, are they legally required to do anything about it?
In Georgia, potentially, yes.
Keepers, Meet Georgia
Georgia has an offense specifically called theft of lost or mislaid property.
Under Georgia Code § 16-8-6, the offense applies when someone comes into control of property they know or learn has been lost or mislaid, appropriates it for their own use, and does so without first taking reasonable measures to restore it to the owner.
That is considerably more conditional than “picking up money is illegal.” The statute concerns what the finder knows and what reasonable measures are taken before keeping the property.
It also means “finders keepers” is not, despite its unusually effective childhood marketing campaign, the complete statement of Georgia property law.
For theft offenses covered by that section, Georgia’s penalty statute generally treats a violation involving property of this value as a misdemeanor. No charge ultimately had to be tested against those provisions in this case.
Thirty Questions
The police post prompted people to work through practically every denomination of American currency.
Some wondered whether finding a dollar would require a trip to customer service. Others brought up quarters, pennies, and money they had found years earlier. Several drew their own line between watching someone drop cash, when they would return it, and discovering money with no obvious owner nearby.
One commenter summed up a recurring question by asking what the threshold was: $20, $10, $1, or even a nickel.
Another joked about having recently kept two quarters and a dime.
The statute itself does not create a minimum amount below which lost property automatically becomes the finder’s. It instead focuses on whether the person knows or learns that the property was lost or mislaid and whether reasonable measures were taken to restore it to its owner.
That still does not tell someone finding an anonymous dollar bill exactly how far a “reasonable” effort must go in every imaginable situation. It does explain why police did not necessarily view the $30 as abandoned simply because it had reached the floor.
Money Back
The public identification effort did not remain open for long.
Albany police later updated the post to say the man had returned the money to its owner.
According to the department, the victim then dropped the charges they had intended to pursue.
So the $30 made it back to its original owner, nobody ended up facing the proposed charge, and a much larger number of people were left reconsidering what they had previously understood to be a fairly straightforward rule about pennies on the ground.