Ownerless Goods is known in latin as Bona Vacantia and it means property or funds that have no rightful owner that can be located and the government takes management or ownership of. In other places depending on the location, it is called by other terms. The US has shortened the term to unclaimed property and usually the individual state manages though at times the US government may take possession of the goods. If you know about the goods and can prove you should have them they can be recovered.
Bank accounts, company assets, property, or anything else that’s worth money counts as unclaimed property in these situations. There are cases in which people die, but they haven’t designated the recipients of their property or items. Whatever department is responsible for overseeing the money or property holds onto them until such time as an heir or other recipient can collect them as stipulated in some kind of will.
This possibility of being the heir to unclaimed property or having unknown money floating in governmental coffers has opened a wide field for scam artists. Everyone hopes that some deceased relative has left money or property that will make them rich simply by answering a letter or e-mail. Dishonest people take advantage of this desire to scam people out of their money.
Availability of Bona vacantia, or unclaimed funds, is usually advertised on the Internet or by other means stating that there are unclaimed funds and one should apply, giving their name and other personal information so that a check can be made to see if they are on the list. Sometimes various family names will also be requested.
Contact will soon follow, provided the family names you submit match their list, and you’ll be asked for more information. You won’t be able to contact a real person in this process, doing all this through email. If you know this, you’ll be less likely to be scammed by tricksters.
Those who wish to scam people through bona vacantia claims just pick email addresses or phone numbers at random and contacts them. You then get an email or a letter from the scammer, informing them of their entitlement to certain withheld and unclaimed funds. The official appearance of the letter will serve to convince you.
Upon responding to the scam correspondence, the victim is then contacted by phone and told that there is a fee or fees that must be made to collect the money. Many times, other money requirements and this ends up with the person contacted losing quite a bit of money without receiving anything in return. That is why it’s important to use telephone look up services such as info-trace.com/area-code-947.jsp in order to be able to verify if the caller is really whom he or she says.
Over any other form of payment a bank draft is considered the best by ripoff artists. A personalized bank draft from the victim opens them up for even worse scams and their name, home address, bank account number and sometimes even driver’s license number become available to the con men. Sending a personal bank check to con men can make the sender vulnerable to ripoff artists who steal their identity. The proper place for letters of this sort is the garbage can and of course never write back to them, the next step would be to email or write the proper agency to report this type of scam.
Please go to info-trace.com/area-code-843.jsp if you want to learn more about telephone look up services online