Things you shouldn't have to tell people

[Kermor]

Inspired by this piece of news :

http://www.cnews.fr/france/2018-06-2...on-coin-786966

Before getting rid of a piece of furniture, check to see if it's empty. Otherwise, you could end up losing something precious to you.

(For those who don't speak french, a man had sold a dresser, and had forgotten a suitcase containing 180 000 € inside. Of course, part of the money had been spent when the police managed to find the guys who had bought the dresser).

[crocoduck_hunter]

Also, don't store your money in a suitcases hidden in your furniture.

[Alarm]

Some thoughts:

1) The purchasers are being charged with resale and theft... I'm thinking because they didn't attempt to return the money, despite having purchased the furniture?
2) they dumped the furniture: Did the find the safety deposit box and then made an offer on the piece?
3) They spent 32000 Euros on "restaurants et provisions" (restaurants and food): how long did it take police to find these guys?

[erwins]

I don't know what the law is in France, but in common law countries, it would be illegal to keep any part of that money. So, yes, before selling furniture, you should be sure it is empty, but also, and IMO more importantly, if you buy an item that turns out to have a suitcase of money inside, that's not your money. In the case of an item you purchased directly from the owner, you give it back.

ETA after seeing Alarm's 2nd post: I don't read French. Presumably what was being sold was "a dresser," and not "the contents of storage space x," or even, "one dresser and all of its contents."

In common law countries, there are typically laws that apply to finding misplaced or lost money. In no jurisdiction that I'm familiar with would you be able to keep any part of the money in a situation like this, unless you followed the procedures and the money went unclaimed.

Also, if the answer to your question 2 is that they saw the money before purchasing it, then it could well play a role in the legal issues.

[NobleHunter]

Man, it would be ridiculously painful waiting to see if you got a reward for returning that much money. I mean it's the proper thing to do, and often the legal thing, but with that much money surely they could spare some as thanks for the prompt return of the suitcase.

[ChasFink]

Originally Posted by erwins

... if you buy an item that turns out to have a suitcase of money inside, that's not your money. In the case of an item you purchased directly from the owner, you give it back.

I'm not sure I understand this. If I buy a relatively complex thing like a dresser, isn't there an assumption that everything in it is part of the sale? What if the seller left a few paperclips in it? A shirt? A pair of earrings? Am I obliged to give these back? How about some scotch tape left for some reason on the underside of a drawer? And most importantly, what if the sale was specifically "a dresser with contents"?

To look at it another way, there have been a number of rulings that say what someone leaves out for trash pickup is fair game for scavengers. So if that dresser with the money was left on the curb, I'd be okay to take it all home, but if I bought it, I have to give the money back?

[GenYus234]

Originally Posted by Seaboe Muffinchucker

They are doing this in Seattle, too, but not to make bus travel faster. They're doing it to deliberately slow down the cars.

Is that to make travel safer or to "encourage" more people to take the bus? And how do you know it is deliberate?

ETA: Have there been any rulings on cash accidentally left in things left out on the curb? Because setting stuff on the curb and accidentally leaving cash inside stuff left out on the curb are two different things.

[erwins]

Originally Posted by ChasFink

I'm not sure I understand this. If I buy a relatively complex thing like a dresser, isn't there an assumption that everything in it is part of the sale? What if the seller left a few paperclips in it? A shirt? A pair of earrings? Am I obliged to give these back? How about some scotch tape left for some reason on the underside of a drawer? And most importantly, what if the sale was specifically "a dresser with contents"?

To look at it another way, there have been a number of rulings that say what someone leaves out for trash pickup is fair game for scavengers. So if that dresser with the money was left on the curb, I'd be okay to take it all home, but if I bought it, I have to give the money back?

Can you reasonably say that you bought the suitcase full of money for whatever you paid for the dresser? The only kind of sale contract that would typically include that would be some kind of unclaimed property/abandoned storage unit sort of thing, where neither buyer nor seller is supposed to know exactly what's inside, and the price reflects the risks. Otherwise, it either was not included in the sale agreement, or you at least have a mistake of fact situation, which can get complicated, but often means the buyer would not get to keep it.

Put another way--say you sell your car to a private party. You realize after they drive away that you left your work laptop in the trunk. You call the buyer and ask them to return it. They say, "sorry, I bought the car and all its contents--the jack, the spare tire, your oil change receipts in the glove box, and your work computer that you left in the trunk. Good luck with not getting fired!" Would you think the terms of the agreement to sell the person the car meant the car would come with the usual car accessories that were present in the car, or would it include all things in the car, including a valuable thing obviously mistakenly left behind, that is not associated with a car?

As for a dresser left on the sidewalk, containing money, you'd have to follow the local laws for found money. Usually, you have to either turn it in to local authorities, or hold it while you make reasonable efforts to find the owner. If you found the dresser on the sidewalk outside a home or apartment building, you'd need to contact the residents to see if they might have forgotten something inside the dresser. Often you are required to post notices of found property. If no one claims the property after a time, some laws let you keep some or all of it. If you keep it without contacting or attempting to find the owner, that usually will constitute theft.

So, contract law typically won't let you keep it, with limited exceptions, civil law has specific requirements for what you do if the owner is unknown, and criminal law typically makes it theft if you don't return it to a known owner, or if unknown, keep it without trying to locate the owner.

[DawnStorm]

Originally Posted by crocoduck_hunter

Also, don't store your money in a suitcases hidden in your furniture.

Check your purses too! I've never found anything valuable in any of the purses I've bought at the thrift store, so somebody is checking! If I did, I would have no idea how to track down the person who donated the purse. At the thrift store I usually do to, you can either donate items in person, or donate them to a charity who then sells those items to store.

[mbravo]

I've put things in strange places for "safe keeping." I once was cleaning some bookshelves up and wondered why one encyclopedia had such a big gap in it. I opened it up and remembered that in 8th or 9th grade I had put a bunch of $5 bills in there "to flatten them." Coulda turned into somebody else's $35 if I'd donated the book.

[erwins]

Usually if you're in a business, you can turn lost items, including money over to the people in charge of the premises. Then it's their problem.

And if you find something while on someone else's property, sometimes it goes to the property owner, rather than the finder. Depends on the local laws, and some specifics.

[musicgeek]

Originally Posted by mbravo

I've put things in strange places for "safe keeping." I once was cleaning some bookshelves up and wondered why one encyclopedia had such a big gap in it. I opened it up and remembered that in 8th or 9th grade I had put a bunch of $5 bills in there "to flatten them." Coulda turned into somebody else's $35 if I'd donated the book.

Pretty sure I did the same thing as a kid (with that exact amount, but as a 20, a 10, and a 5) in a leather billfold - "for safekeeping" in some book or other, and I'm pretty sure I subsequently sold it in a family tag sale.

[DawnStorm]

Do not call a talk show and rail against intemperate language (children are listening!) and then utter the same intemperate language. The host will-and did-hit the dump button.

[Ellestar]

Originally Posted by erwins

Can you reasonably say that you bought the suitcase full of money for whatever you paid for the dresser? The only kind of sale contract that would typically include that would be some kind of unclaimed property/abandoned storage unit sort of thing, where neither buyer nor seller is supposed to know exactly what's inside, and the price reflects the risks. Otherwise, it either was not included in the sale agreement, or you at least have a mistake of fact situation, which can get complicated, but often means the buyer would not get to keep it.

Okay I have a somewhat related question based on a number of news stories I've seen on this subject:

What if you buy a mediocre painting at a garage sale, then when you get it home, you find that there is another painting under the one you bought (whether it's been repainted, or somehow further tacked under the painting you can see) by someone really famous. So now your $5 landscape is a $50,000 Picasso.

Is that just tough luck for the seller or do similar rules apply in that the seller thought they were selling one thing, not the more expensive thing inside?

[DrRocket]

Originally Posted by crocoduck_hunter

Theater etiquette: ....If you must eat while watching the film, do so quietly and don't eat things that are stinky.....

May I hereby call for a ban on theaters selling anything packaged in brittle cellophane? And also, call for a ban on anyone "digging" into said package of cellophane when going after another piece of whatever?

Time, after time, after time, after.....

[crocoduck_hunter]

I'd like to second that.

[DawnStorm]

Ellestar--something very similar happened in this area a few years ago: a woman bought a painting at a thrift store that turned out to be not only a Monet, but a stolen one at that. IIRC, she just wanted the frame, but decided to get everything appraised by an expert. The painting was returned to its rightful owner.

[Darth Credence]

I was thinking along the lines of the guy who found one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence in a picture he bought for $4. At no point in that story did I hear anything like it should belong to the thrift shop that sold the frame. You certainly can't say you reasonably purchased that for $4, when it would auction for a million. Any ideas as to what the difference is?

[WildaBeast]

Originally Posted by Don Enrico

No, Mr. Trump, crime in Germany isn't "way up"!

In fact, the crime rate has fallen by 10 percent in 2017 to the lowest figures in more than 25 years.

http://www.dw.com/en/donald-trump-cl...ion/a-44277845

According to something I heard on NPR last year, apparently conservative media, Breitbart in particular, have been citing a statistics from German law enforcement that include the "crime" of entering Germany without a visa in their numbers. So that's probably where Trump got the idea. Of course that's not the sort of crime people imagine when you just say "crime is way up" while omitting the details about exactly what offenses you're talking about.

Originally Posted by Darth Credence

I was thinking along the lines of the guy who found one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence in a picture he bought for $4. At no point in that story did I hear anything like it should belong to the thrift shop that sold the frame. You certainly can't say you reasonably purchased that for $4, when it would auction for a million. Any ideas as to what the difference is?

If I had to guess, the difference might be that neither the thrift store nor the person who donated the frame knew that it was there, so they had no expectation of being able to go to the purchaser and ask for it back. Whereas in the case of the dresser with the money in it, the seller presumably knew the money was there (because he put it there) and therefore had the right to ask for it back.

What I'm curious about is if there's some lower limit to the amount that one is obligated to return. If I buy a used car and the seller leaves a couple of dollars worth of change in the cup holder surely I'm not expected to go through a lot of effort to return that, am I? What if I buy a cheap used car for $1000 and while cleaning it out I discover a $100 bill wadded up in the ash tray? That's not a huge sum of money, but it is 10% of the price of the car.

[Don Enrico]

Originally Posted by WildaBeast

According to something I heard on NPR last year, apparently conservative media, Breitbart in particular, have been citing a statistics from German law enforcement that include the "crime" of entering Germany without a visa in their numbers. So that's probably where Trump got the idea.

Not even that can be right. Here is the official statistics on crime in Germany for 2017 (downloadable pdf, 1 MB). According to that,

• overall crime (page 10, table 3.1-T01) is down -9.6 percent from 2016,
• overall crime without crimes against visa laws (page 10, Table 3.1-T02) is down -5.1 percent, and
• and crimes against visa laws and alien laws (page 19, table 3.2-T20) are down -63.1 percent, from 487,711 cases in 2016 to only 179,848 cases in 2017. Among those, the crime of illegally crossing the border is down by -79.9 percent.

But this statistics is probably why President Trump alleges that the German gouvernment is lying to the people. If the numbers do not look like he wants them to look, it's fake news.