June 8. By Dave Yochum. There may be a check waiting for you in Raleigh. In fact, there is more than $500,000 waiting for Cornelius residents at the NC Treasurer’s office.
Click the links below to download the escheat file:
All you have to do is claim it, says NC Rep. John Bradford, a Cornelius resident. He requested a spreadsheet from the NC Treasurer’s office for District 98 that lists all the “escheat” (say es-CHEAT) funds that are sitting unclaimed in Raleigh.
There’s no cheating involved, just missing people. Escheat is a feudal French term that refers to property reverting to a titled aristocrat when someone in his manor died without heirs. In North Carolina—and the rest of the country—it now refers to unclaimed property like bank accounts, wages, utility deposits, insurance policy proceeds, stocks, bonds, and contents of safe deposit boxes that typically have been abandoned for one to five years.
In North Carolina it refers to funds that are unclaimed because a company loses track of the consumer, due to an incorrect address or other missing information.
Our searchable database shows amounts ranging from a few dollars to more than $50,000.
By law, these funds are escheated, or turned over, to the Department of State Treasurer for safekeeping. As new funds are added, the NC Cash database is updated, which means that your name could be listed.
Bradford suggests searching the database by name and address. “I feel like Santa Claus and I am excited about making sure people have access to this data just to see if they are owed any money,” he says.
Bradford, the owner of Park Avenue Properties on West Catawba, said he found money that was owed to him. “I thought, ‘what about everybody else.’” A total of $501,121.81 is due Cornelius residents.
In Bradford’s case, the escheated funds had to do with a refund from an insurance policy related to a real estate transaction. (The transaction could relate to an address that’s never been your mailing address.) If the check never gets to you, it goes back to the company that issued you the check. The company doesn’t want unclaimed money on their books, so they simply mail it to the state. And there it sits, waiting to be claimed.
Another way to search is through the NC Treasurer’s website https://www.nctreasurer.com/Claim-Your-Cash/Claim-Your-NC_Cash/Pages/Search.aspx. It only allows searches by first and last name.
Bradford suggests searching both the state website and all the fields in the spreadsheet. Use your last name, maiden name, street name, business name, etc.
“By searching your street name, for example, you might find friends and neighbors that also have unclaimed money,” Bradford said.
