Do you have a bank account that you don’t actively use or a safe deposit box that you have not checked on for a while? If so, you might want to see if the government has grabbed your money. This sounds absolutely crazy, but it is true. All over the world, governments are shortening the time periods required before they can seize “dormant bank accounts” and “unclaimed property”. For example, as you will read about below, just last year the government of Australia seized a whopping 360 million dollars from dormant bank accounts. And this kind of thing is going on all over America as well. In fact, all 50 states actually pay private contractors to locate bank accounts and unclaimed property that can be seized. In some states, no effort will be made to contact you when your property is confiscated. And in most states, the seized property permanently become the property of the state government after a certain waiting period has elapsed. So please don’t put money or property into a bank somewhere and just let it sit there. If you do, the government may come along and grab it right out from under your nose.
In this day and age, broke governments all over the globe are searching for “creative ways” to raise revenues. In Australia for example, the time period required before the federal government could seize a dormant bank account was reduced from seven to three years, and this resulted in an unprecedented windfall for the Australian government over the past 12 months…
The federal government has seized a record $360 million from household bank accounts that have been dormant for just three years, prompting outrage in some quarters amid complaints that pensioners and retirees have lost deposits.
Figures from the Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) show almost $360 million was collected from 80,000 inactive accounts in the year to May under new rules introduced by Labor. The new rules lowered the threshold at which the government is allowed to snatch funds from accounts that remain idle from seven years to three years.
The rule change has delivered the government a massive bonanza with the money collected in the year to May more than the total collected in the past five decades combined.
