(Credit: KDKA)
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — By the thousands, you and your neighbors have been online and on the phone today calling the Pennsylvania Department of Treasury saying “show me the money,” and a dent has been put into that pot of $1.6 billion of unclaimed money.
It was a beautiful day in Harrisburg Wednesday, but the operators at the state’s Unclaimed Property Office never saw it.
Instead, they have been super-glued to their phones all day long.
“We estimate that one in 10 people in Pennsylvania have unclaimed property so we really encourage people to check,” said Maureen Ferrari, the assistant director at the Unclaimed Property Office.
The easiest way of course is online at PaTreasury.org, but many people have been reaching out by phone. Some though are getting a busy signal.
If that’s the case for your, Ferrari says just keep trying, and while your at it, you might want to check on your business too.
“Our highest claim payment of $2.1 million actually went to a business,” she said.
Meanwhile, if you’ve gone the online route, be careful.
If you Google unclaimed money, there is a good chance you will end up on a site that wants to charge you to search for your name. But if you go to the state website, you don’t have to pay.
While you wait for Pennsylvania to answer, you might want to think about where you’ve lived in the past. Through a couple of websites like Unclaimed.org and MissingMoney.com, you can easily link to other states’ websites to check for money there as well.
Unfortunately, the federal government is not so user-friendly.
Uncle Sam may indeed have some of your money, but as the Treasury website says “there is no government-wide, centralized information service or database… Each individual federal agency maintains its own records.”
If you scroll down just a bit there are links to the four federal sites that could be holding some of your money.
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