Old photos are among items New Jersey treasury officials are safeguarding, waiting for their rightful owners to claim. (Photo courtesy of N.J. Treasury)
By Dana DiFilippo
Reprinted with permission
New Jersey Monitor
Anyone looking to recover from holiday spending sprees might want to check with New Jersey’s treasury department.
The state is holding onto $7 billion in unclaimed funds and property, waiting on their rightful owners to take it all back.
Most is cash, but people have left everything from jewelry to guns to a violin stashed in safe-deposit boxes around the Garden State, said Steve Harris, who has headed the treasury’s unclaimed property administration since 2008. Banks auction the boxes’ contents after five years and forward the proceeds — which amount to about $900,000 a year — to the administration for safekeeping, Harris said.
“People die, or they move and forget about it. Or someone doesn’t tell their wife that they have a box, and the bank opens it up and it’s loaded with cash,” he said.
The agency has returned $3.1 billion in cash and liquidated items since it formed in 1947, including $720 million in the last three years alone, Harris said.
Many of the items in abandoned safe-deposit boxes are gold and silver coins, jewelry, and cash, which could be a fortune, with gold worth over $4,000 an ounce, he said.
Officials also have found half-smoked cigarettes in the boxes, as if their owners dashed off, mid-puff, in the middle of admiring their riches. Sentimental items including Purple Hearts and other military medals sometimes get left behind too, he said.
“We try to find a family, in those cases, to get those medals back to them,” Harris said. “We will not sell those medals.”
The items are secured in a safe space, but Harris declined to say where.
“It’s not like Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s more like maybe six or seven rows of items,” he said. “We have cameras and everything else, and nobody knows where it is — really only about six people.”
CLICK HERE to begin your search.
A 1905 declaration signed by President Theodore Roosevelt is among unclaimed items the state treasury department is safeguarding while waiting for its rightful owners to claim it. (Photo courtesy of N.J. Treasury)
