Pennies from heaven!
Good Samaritan alerts owner to lost wallet by leaving messages with 1p deposits in account
WHEN Good Samaritan Simon Byford found a wallet in the street, he was at first puzzled as to how to trace its owner.
It contained an ID card and bank cards, but no address or phone number.
Then software developer Mr Byford, 30 came up with an ingenious solution. He paid 1p into one of the bank accounts four times, as each transaction allowed a message of up to 18 characters. His sequence read: ‘Hi, I found your’, ‘wallet in the road’, then a phone number followed by ‘Text or call!’.
Meanwhile, the wallet’s owner Tim Cameron had realised it had fallen from his back pocket in north London as he cycled home from work on Monday. He retraced his three-mile route in vain.
Product manager Mr Cameron, 30, then noticed the 1p payments and accompanying messages in his account. He immediately rang the number and cycled the two miles from his home in Highbury to Mr Byford’s home in Islington.
‘When I got to his house I said “You’re a legend”, shook his hand, was reunited with my wallet and then I gave him a bottle of wine,’ Mr Cameron said.
‘He’s the nicest bloke ever – it’s not surprising he went above and beyond to get it back to me. [When I lost it] I thought, “Damn, this is going to be a lot of work to sort out”. It had my UK biometric residence permit, all my bank cards.’
Mr Byford had been cycling home when he saw the wallet in the road. He tried to find Mr Cameron on Facebook, but struggled as it is a common name.
He had the idea of leaving short messages via 1p bank transfers as a ‘long shot’ – but to his surprise about an hour later his phone rang. Mr Byford said: ‘I just felt surprise and delight. I was expecting him to call eventually but it all happened quite quickly.
‘It was also just a bit of a puzzle – like how do I contact this dude who I have such little information about? It was an interesting thing to ponder. If I lost my wallet in the road, I would want someone to do the same.’
Mr Cameron praised Mr Byford’s ingenious detective work on Twitter in a post that has already been liked or retweeted more than 170,000 times.