Why Do People Not Check Clothes For Thousands Of Dollars Before Donating To Goodwill?

I’m willing to bet that most of us check your clothes pockets for money and other objects before tossing things in the wash or handing stuff over to a dry cleaner. And I’m also pretty certain that for most of us, all that pocket-mining has never turned up more than an errant $20 bill or two. But time and again, people keep donating old duds to Goodwill without checking to see if there might be a few thousand dollars hidden inside.

The latest tale of accidental donation comes from southern Illinois, where a Goodwill employee found $2,600 in cash inside of some recently donated clothing.

Rather than pocket the cash or consider it a donation to the organization, the store is going all Rust Cohle on this mystery, sifting through store records and video footage to whittle down the suspects possible donators to a group of three or so folks. The store isn’t even revealing identifying details about the donated clothes just to make sure that no one can falsely claim the money.

This is the third time this store alone has been down this road. In fact, it’s the second time in a row that the accidentally donated cash totaled $2,600, reports KTVI in St. Louis. Before that, there was the case of the $7,500 in an envelope inside a donated shoebox.

And we’ve certainly written about our fair share of big-ticket inadvertent donations to Goodwill:

• Jan. 2014: $43,000 found in a suit donated to a store in Michigan.

• June 2012: A Minnesota woman finds a diamond ring, valued between $5,000 and $8,000, inside a pair of second-hand pants.

• Dec. 2011: An Illinois octogenarian claims to have accidentally turned over his entire life savings — $13,000 — to Goodwill by accidentally leaving it in a suit pocket.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist