Why doesn't stuff like this happen to me? South Carolina collected $1.8B (Yes B as in Billion) in a random bank account and has no idea where it came from. Rather be lucky than good as the saying goes. South Carolina finds $1.8B, but doesn't know where the money came from COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina has collected about $1.8 billion in a bank account over the past decade and state and private accountants are still trying to figure out where the cash came from and where it was supposed to go. “It’s like going into your bank and the bank president tells you we have a lot of money in our vault but we just don’t know who it belongs to,” said Republican Sen. Larry Grooms, who is leading a Senate panel investigating the problem. It’s the latest trouble with the state’s books and the two agencies, typically led by elected officials, that are in charge of making sure government accounts stay balanced. Last year, the elected Republican comptroller general — the state’s top accountant — resigned after his agency started double posting money in higher education accounts, leading to a $3.5 billion error that was all on paper. The problem started as the state shifted computer systems in the 2010s.
Sam Wheat never found Carl Bruner's laundered money in a fake account... and no one else found it before they died.
If you have a savings account and don't generate activity in it, the state seizes it after some time. I opened a savings account for each of my boys when they were born, and I got a letter a decade later from a company that specializes in recovering siezed assets (and has an incentive to find you) Ten years of interest gone, and then some. I am confident that South Carolina could find the owner of the account they are seizing, but it is not in their interest to do so.
