Legitimate unclaimed property that doesn't appear in any state directory?
"Most states have a ""cap"" on the amount a ""heir finder"" can charge for retrieving the property.  It is generally around 10%.  Even if the state does not have a particular statute you can usually negotiate the rate with the company.  Thirty-percent is extortion, if they won't do it for less, someone else will." It's true that most states have limits on what finders can charge if the listing is in state possession. If it is in the pre-escheat phase (that period of time before it goes to the state) then even if the money will eventually go to the state, the limits don't apply. Keane does a lot of work with transfer agents that handle the administrative work of stocks.  Other options that have a time limit include  I have a friend that was contacted by Keane. It turned out to be stock that her mother had when she worked for AMEX. She got busy with other things and got another letter from Keane. The stock increased in value and they wanted more money to help her even though they had already done the work of finding her. The money eventually went to the state and she was able to claim the full amount for FREE. If the suggestions I gave you don't get results, contact me through my web site and I'll try to help. Good luck! @ Chris:  Companies like Keane, ours, and others know where to look for these funds and where to ask at the correct agencies that are holding this money that is not part of the public links that you have access to. This is how we find this information.  Our types of companies spend significant time, money and resources in finding out about the money, then finding who it actually belongs to (because it does not always belong to who is mentioned on the list) and then finding the correct individual. @ jdsweet:  I apologize if you think this is a marketing ploy.  It is not.  Our company doesn't even take phone calls from people that want us to find them money.  Only if we contact someone, because at that time we're confident that the person we touch base with is due the funds. Again, I am not plugging our company, but trying to let Neil know that in some cases he is right, you don't need a third party to claim funds for you - if you can find them.  In this case, he has looked and cannot find them.  Keane is charging a fair amount to retrieve funds he cannot find and doesn't know about and is not charging him anything to do all the work. Again, as mentioned above, the direct answer is that we know how to access information and lists that have this money hidden from the public because the agency holding the funds doesn't want you to know about it so that they can escheat the funds.  Escheating is the state's legal way to confiscate your money.   See, if you don't put in a claim for the money (depending on what type it is and where it is located) the agency and state holding the funds has certain time frames for you to get the money.  If you don't, again, they get to keep it and that is what they want despite what they say.  That is why there is approximately $33 Billion that is known to the public and really $1 Trillion that's out there. I apologize if you think that this is a plug for my company, it's not because we're not looking for calls, we make them.  I'm also not asking Neil for his business. From all accounts on my side, this seems like a fair deal. So while these companies are not a scam, 30% feels pretty darn high.  How about you negotiate a much lower rate?  10% or 15%? Here is why: You will spend time and effort (which technically isn't free) to find the money.  I bet you can find it if you look hard enough.  But you could also just collect it and give this company a cut for their expertise. However if 30% bugs you (and it would bug me) then consider their reality.  They spent money to find the funds and contact you.  HOWEVER, that is a sunk cost.  It is already spent.  You can find it on your own and they get zip.  Or you negotiate a lower percentage, they get enough to cover their costs and make some profit and you save a ton of time. Since they took the time to explain themselves here, they are either scammers trying to bully you into compliance, or they are legit.  It is field that people might look down on, but it isn't criminal. I would look for the money if it were me, but I feel I have enough free time that it would be worth it. for full disclosure I'm an Independent Contractor and work with Jeff Richman. @ Neil:  Question 1: How legitimate is this?  If you were never contacted by the company you would never know about the money. Period, end of story. Not trying to be rude but that is the bottom line truth. Look up asset recovery businesses. They are in every city almost. They work for individuals, governments and businesses. Very legitimate business. Question 2: Since this doesn't seem to be the case, how does this company know that I potentially have unclaimed assets to claim?  I understand your concern and the best analogy I can think of to explain this is:  A company's copier breaks down. A copy machine repair man is called. He shows up and opens the copier and studies it intensely and closes it back up. He takes a hammer out of his bag and hits the copier on the side in two different places, twice. The copier starts working. He charges the company owner a $1000.00. The company owner is glad to pay it because without the knowledge of the repair man, his business is not making money. This is the same: The professionals at Keane have specific knowledge about how to, where to and who to ask for these lists. Granted, it's not your business we're talking about here but without them, you get nothing.  2 professionals have advised you to move forward; your brother's accountant and lawyer. Take the money. It costs you nothing. If they want money from you up front or want you to pay for stuff, run. You can't blame companies like 'Legal Claimant Services' for making a profit by providing this service. That is capitalism and it is the way of the world.  It is just like any other business you can do yourself - from making dinner to cutting your own grass. If you choose to do it yourself, you save money but you also do the work. When I got my letter telling me about a claim, I automatically went online to do some research. That's how I found this site and information that led me to validate the claim. I then chose to follow a few simple instructions and keep all of the claim instead of giving away 30%.
"For Non-Resident filers, New York taxes New York-sourced income. That includes: real or tangible personal property located in New York State   (including certain gains or losses from the sale or exchange of an   interest in an entity that owns real property in New York State); services performed in New York State; a business, trade, profession, or occupation carried on in New York State; and a New York S corporation in which you are a shareholder (including   installment income from an IRC 453 transaction). There are some exclusions as well. It is all covered in the instructions to form IT-203. However, keep in mind that ""filing"" as non-resident doesn't make you non-resident. If you spend 184 days or more in New York State, and you have a place to stay there - you are resident. See definitions here. Even if you don't actually live there and consider yourself a CT resident." "It appears as others have said that companies are not required to state this on as any sort of Asset. I remembered a friend of mine is a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property Rights so asked him and confirmed that there's no document companies are required to file which states all patent holdings as assets. There are two ways he suggested for finding out. Once you find a company you're interested in can search patents by company using one of the two following: US Patent Office website's advanced search: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm aanm/company for example entering into the textarea, ""aanm/google"" without the quotation marks will find patents by Google. The other is a Google Patent Search: http://www.google.com/patents/" "Under no circunstances will the bank keep the money for itself. Keeping the money is considered Unjust Enrichment: A general equitable principle that no person should be allowed to profit at another's expense without making restitution for the reasonable value of any property, services, or other benefits that have been unfairly received and retained. The banks will attempt to, in order: Wait for some time: Generally, a time frame of three to five years with no customer-initiated activity sends an account into dormancy. The amount of time that must lapse depends on the [US] state in which the bank account was opened. Attempt to contact the account holder: (...) the bank must try to notify the account holder. If the customer does not respond within a certain amount of time, the balance on the account will be turned over to the state. Turn over the money to the government: In a process what is called “escheating” an account, banks are required to turn over funds from the inactive account to the state treasury. Once the account is sent to the state, the funds are held as unclaimed property. At this point the account no longer exists so far the bank is concerned.  To reclaim your money, you will have to contact your state for the instructions on how to get your money back. You’ll need to complete and submit a claim form along with the necessary identification. If you happen to have unclaimed property held by the state, you can begin the retrieval process by visiting www.unclaimed.org. For a foreigner, it is not unreasonable that the bank would attempt to contact the diplomatic body of the country of origin in step 2, but that may be subject to bank policy. There is some paperwork the bank needs to do to ""escheat"" the account and properly transfer the money to the state." "I assume you've no debt - if you do then pay that off. I'd be tempted to put the money into property.  If you look at property prices over the past 20 years or so, you can see returns can be very good.  I bought a house in 1998 and sold it in 2003 for about 110% of the purchase price.  Disclaimer, past performance is no guarantee of future returns! It's a fairly low risk option, property prices appear to be rising currently and it's always good to get your foot on the housing ladder as quickly as you can as prices can rise to the stage where even those earning quite a good salary cannot afford to buy. Of course you don't have to live in the house, a rental income can be very handy without tying you down too much. There are plenty of places in the UK where £60k will buy you a reasonable property with a rental income of £400-£500, it doens't have to be near where you live currently. Just to put a few more figures in - if you get a house for £50k and rent it for £400 a month (perfectly feasible where I live) then that's very close to a 10% return year on year.  Plus any gains made by the price of the house. The main downside is you won't have easy access to the money and you will have to look after a tenant if you decide to rent it out.  Also if you do buy a property make sure it is in a good state of repair, you don't want to have to pay for a new roof for example in a couple of years time. Ideally you would then sell the house around the time property prices peak and buy another when they bottom out again.  Not easy to judge though! I'd review the Trust Fund against others if you decide to keep it there as 12% over 6 years isn't great, although the stock market has been depressed so it may compare favouribly. Keep some ""rainy day"" money spare if you can." I had this happen to me with parking ticket when I was still in school.  The tickets were issued by the school police and later dismissed (because I had purchased a year-long parking pass).  3 years later I got a letter alleging that I had unpaid parking ticket.  So they lost the record of dismissal.  But they did not lose the record of having issued the ticket.   I am fairly certain this happens because legal entities either lose electronic records and restore data from backups without realizing that some corrupted data remains lost or because they transition to a new system and certain real-world events don't get transferred properly to the new system.  Of course, the people with whom you end up interacting at that point have no idea of any potential technical problems (because they may occur only in some technical one-off cases).  In my case, I was able to show that I had received a judgement of dismissal.  I actually kept the paperwork. The question is what do you do if you lost the records and the state had lost all electronic records of your payments.  Let's assume the collections agency has a record (produced by the state) that you owed the ticket amount, but the state claims that no record exists of you having paid the tickets.  What do you do, then? Carefully compile the list of all possible banks which you could have possibly used.  Then request duplicate statements from all the banks which you have on that list.  Assuming you were a regular consumer and not running a business, this should not amount to more than 100 pages or so.  If you do manage to find the transactions in those bank records, you are in luck.  States, unlike the federal government, are not immune from law suits.  So you can consult a lawyer.   By fraudulently claiming that you defaulted on payments, the state caused you material harm (by lowering your credit rating and increasing your cost of borrowing).  Once you have all the paperwork in hand, you still will have difficult time finding anyone in the state to listen to you.  And even if you do, you will not be compensated for the time and expenses you expanded to obtain these records. If you indeed paid the tickets, then you are being asked to prove your innocence and you are assumed guilty until you do.  Again, a good lawyer should be able to do something with that to get you a proper compensation for this. "There are at least three financial institutions involved here: your insurance company's bank, the money center, and your bank. Normally, they would keep records, but given that the money center didn't even ask for your signature, ""normal"" probably doesn't apply to them. Still, you can still ask them what records they have, in addition to the other two institutions; the company's bank and your bank likely have copies of the check." "Nah. Fill it in on the line that says ""Other Income"" with type of ""5th Amendment"". There's lots of reasons why you might want to do this, and it's the government's job to find out which one, and they're not allowed to use the bare fact that you put 5th Amendment there to open an investigation." "In your mother's position, I would do two things: Get a copy of her credit report. Money Advice Service has a useful page on how to do this - it is cheap (£2) or free to do and will immediately tell you if someone else is using her address for anything untoward. Check with the Post Office whether anyone has set up a redirect on mail to your Mum's address. You can redirect by individual names, so if Joe Bloggs buys a bunch of stuff and has it sent to him at your Mum's address, he could set up a redirect at the Post Office so any post for Joe Bloggs at that address gets redirected to Joe Blogg's real address. There is a page about this on the Post Office website, I don't know exactly how to check if someone else has set this up but I'm sure the Post Office would help you find out. Additionally, I would consider visiting the address (the same house number in the ""Road"" where hers is in the ""Avenue"") and see whether the occupants have anything useful to say about this. I would just say you'd had some mis-delivered post, and want to check what their names are so that you can pass on anything that is intended for them that comes to your address (and ask them to do likewise for you). Depending on how that goes you could also ask about the ebay store and see whether it really is them that set it up."