Georgia Police Mounted A Manhunt For A Guy Who Picked Up $30 Off The Ground At A Walmart

Most people won’t think twice about picking up and keeping any money they find lying on the ground while going about their day. However, you may want to do exactly that when you consider police in Georgia tried to track down a man who scooped up $30 while wandering the aisles of a Walmart.

“Finders keepers, losers weepers” may not actually be an enforceable legal principle, but it generally applies to situations where you stumble across something in the wild that has little to no chance of being reunited with the person who lost it.

There may technically be laws you’re supposed to follow when you end up in that situation, but most people are equipped with a moral compass that leads them to do the right thing.

If you come across a phone, wallet, or some object that’s objectively valuable, you have a bit of an obligation to do what you can to track down the person who lost it, deliver it to a lost and found, or even get the police involved if it’s particularly expensive or involves a significant amount of cash.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that label doesn’t apply to $30, but that didn’t stop police in Georgia from devoting more time and resources than they probably should have to hunting down someone who made off with that sum.

A man who found $30 on the ground at a Walmart in Georgia ended up being wanted by the police

Before I continue, I should note that I’m aware $30 can be a lot of money to people who are dealing with financial issues. With that said, it’s also not an amount that would drive the typical person to go out of their way to find out who dropped it in a situation where the odds of doing so seem slim to none.

That was the scenario one man in the city of Albany, Georgia found himself facing last week when he was doing some shopping at Walmart, as he came across $30 on the ground and decided to tuck it into his pocket.

You could argue he should have surrendered it to the store’s lost-and-found, although it’s hard to blame him for holding onto it instead of surrendering it at a counter where it could have been simply claimed by an employee or boosted the coffers of an $835 billion corporation that certainly doesn’t need any more money than it already has.

However, he probably should have done that in hindsight when you consider the person who dropped it decided to call the police, who apparently scoured security footage until they identified the suspect, whose image was subsequently shared on its Facebook page as they asked the public for help tracking him down.

The comments of that post (and a number of others on the department’s page) were subsequently flooded by critics who couldn’t believe the crime in question was a crime at all, including more than a few people who noted more taxpayer money was probably spent pursuing the case than the amount of cash at the center of it.

Things ultimately worked out in the end. The department updated the post to say they were able to track down the man, who returned the money to the person who said they no longer wanted to pursue charges after being reunited with what was rightfully theirs.

You’ve been warned.