(Part 1 of 2)

In May of 2007, Illinois State Treasurer State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias stated that the state's "Cash Dash" abandoned asset program is holding roughly $1.4 Billion in Illinois unclaimed money. The only thing standing between the cash and its rightful owners is the knowledge that it is out there and the ability to track it down.

Sadly in addition to Illinois, state treasury departments across the United States keep on taking in more unclaimed money each year than they give back to the citizens. Because everyone believes in the old "if it's too good to be true" saying, most people do not believe that there are really tens of billions of dollars that can be claimed nationwide. Even for those few who have learned the truth about unclaimed properties, the best way to locate these monies eludes them most of the time.

The Prairie is State is one of just a few states that holds over 1 billion dollars on its own, which means if you are a resident of Illinois then you have even better odds of locating a claim in your name, especially after you consider that the state has just under 13 million people and there are over 10 million names on the state's Illinois database.

Although there are quite a few more, Illinois lists the following as the most common sources of missing money: abandoned savings and checking accounts, unpaid wages or commissions, stock, bonds, mutual funds, un-cashed dividends, customer deposits or overpayments, credit balances, refunds, money orders, travelers checks, paid-up life insurance policies, safe deposit box contents. Anyone who has had or knows someone who might have had one of these accounts at some point in the past is encouraged to search regularly.

The Illinois State Treasury has returned over 432 million dollars since it took control of the unclaimed money program in 1999, 84 million dollars of which was given back in 2006 alone, but with $1.4 Billion waiting to be claimed and more coming in every year, the mountain of cash will continue to grow.

(to be continued)

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State May Take Unclaimed Bottle Deposits (Eyewitness News 3 Hartford)
Gov. M. Jodi Rell is proposing that state government take control of the millions of dollars in bottle and can deposits that soda and beer drinkers in Connecticut leave unclaimed each year.

Unclaimed can deposits total millions – WWLP 22News

WWLP 22News

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Rents up in New Orleans while $846m sits unclaimed (The Charlotte Observer)
(By JOHN MORENO GONZALES, Associated Press Writer) The four-unit shotgun house that Sandra Marshall bought after decades of double shifts has sat untouched since the flooding of Hurricane Katrina, while nearly $850 million in federal aid for her and thousands of other mom-and-pop landlords sits on a bureaucratic shelf. "I have old tenants calling me all the time asking when I'm going to get the …