Unclaimed property scams rising tenfold, bringing ID theft

WASHINGTON — The email or letter looks official, and it contains an attentiongrabbing message: The state is holding on to your unclaimed property, which may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All you have to do is pay a fee upfront or provide your personal information, and the money is yours.

But the letters and emails are the work of scammers, not state officials. A growing number of people across the country are receiving these messages, and some are falling for them, losing thousands of dollars or becoming victims of identity theft in the process.

“These scams are just rampant,” said David Milby, director of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, which represents state unclaimed property programs. “The email from the public we’ve been getting about this has increased tenfold in the past year.”

Some scammers pretend they work for NAUPA and have even used its letterhead to make their pitch.

Besides costing victims money, consumer advocates say this kind of fraud diminishes public trust in state agencies that handle unclaimed property and makes it harder for them to do their jobs.

Unclaimed property is cash or other financial assets considered lost or abandoned when an owner can’t be found after a certain period of time. It includes dormant savings accounts and CDs, life insurance payments, death benefits, uncashed utility dividends and the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes.

There is plenty of it. In 2015, unclaimed property agencies in the U.S. collected $7.8 billion and returned $3.2 billion to rightful owners, according to NAUPA.

The treasurer, comptroller or auditor of each state maintains a list of abandoned property and runs an online database that anyone can search by name for free. Forty states and the District of Columbia also provide that information to a NAUPA-endorsed national website that the public can search.

But fraudsters don’t bother reviewing that data. They simply contact people at random, hoping to snare a victim.

Milby said no one keeps data on the number of complaints states get about unclaimed property scams. But he said he received hundreds of emails last year from people reporting they had been contacted by a fraudster. “You get to the point where people don’t know what’s real and what’s not real,” he said. “It’s a sorry state of affairs.”