Got a letter yesterday from Joel Maul, who calls himself a “Relationship Manager” with EquiSearch, a White Plains, N.Y. outfit that helps people recover unclaimed funds.
Mr. Maul wrote to me about a year ago on the same matter - some unclaimed stock owned by my late mother.
EquiSearch is cagey in that they don’t tell you what and where the funds are - only a general hint about the amount, like “the current value of this account exceeds $X.”
After reading the fine print and discovering that EquiSearch takes 35% of the funds they recover, I decided to handle the matter myself.
EquiSearch apparently counts on people being too lazy or too stupid to do the recovery work themselves, but being a retired journalist with the skill and inclination to find out pretty much anything I want to know, I wasn’t about to give them a piece of the action.
It really isn’t all that hard to track down stuff like this. The Indiana Attorney General’s office has a website dedicated to helping people recover misplaced funds. Every state has such a mechanism and it doesn’t take much Googling to find the right sites.
So I recovered the funds and, in the process, found a bunch of unclaimed money belonging to friends and, incidentally, my ex wife. There’s about $405 worth of stock from her dad’s estate waiting for her to claim it and, as the executrix of her parents’ estate, it should be she and not one of her two sisters, who goes after it. I e-mailed her about it last year when I turned it up but a check of the Attorney General’s site last night shows she still hasn’t retrieved it. I suppose I’ll e-mail her again, mainly because I hate loose ends.
So I was surprised when I got Mr. Maul’s letter yesterday, considering that the funds he’s offering to recover are no longer out there. I think I’ll use his postage-paid business reply mail envelope to thank him for the heads-up.
1 comment:
Hi - I am an Unclaimed Property Professional and was wondering whether you tied up those 'loose ends'? The money that Equisearch initially found may be posted now as several years have passed. I am preparing to open my Professional Unclaimed Property site www.unclaimedpropertyinfo.com on 6/21/10 and a Consumer site will be following shortly thereafter. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about your experience. BTW, you may want to check any other state that you may be an heir. And although it may sound illegal for Equisearch to charge 35%, these are 'pre-escheat' funds that are not available to the public and the owner can choose to wait until they are available on the state's websites after they are reported. And, as offensive as it may be to pay 35%, consider the research effort that Equisearch put in to locate you and the value the owner places on obtaining the money sooner, not later. Also, consider the Holder that may have sold the list and/or is not performing effective due diligence to return the funds to you directly? It is a very interesting and complicated industry, that I hope my websites will demystify and help the consumer and the profession.
Sheryl Flaherty
President
Hero Consulting Group
Post a Comment