Giving someone a reward for returning something like a phone or a wallet seems like something you give a kid. To teach them the value of being honest, or something. I think at my age, I would be slightly insulted in I found someone’s cell phone, returned it to them and they offered me money. If we were meeting up at a coffee shop for me to return it to them and they offered to buy me a cup of coffee while we were there, that would be different.
One time we found a stray dog and kept it until it’s owners could come get it. They brought a pie! That was awesome. Unexpected and unnecessary, but awesome. I would have felt weird if they had offered me money.
So apparently I am the only mercenary asshole on the board, or at least the only one who would admit it in a public poll.
I’m pretty sure it’s well outside the statue of limitations, but due to board rules all I’ll say is they guy who owned the phone was a bigger asshole than I was, and he wasn’t getting anything from me for free.
Offering a reward as in “Hey, can I buy you a drink?” would have been nice … but if you are broke, you are broke. A gracious thank you is enough. If he went to any expense to return the phone, reimbursement would be called for. His asking for a reward is out in douchebag territory. Really uncalled for.
I’m sure there are exceptions where the phone owner was being a massive douchebag (in which case I’d throw the phone in the garbage) but in general to demand a reward in that case is fucking sociopathic. I get a lot more out of being kind and helpful.
Whoa, whoa. Sociopathic? Really? I’m not snooping through their phone for blackmail material. I’m not using it to lure them somewhere to do bad things to them. Those would be sociopathic things to do. I’ll even add that if this was a friend’s phone, I’d just give it back to them. For a stranger however, I’d give them the choice to provide me with a little money or to pay a lot more money for a new phone, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
I work customer service for one of the major three carries. It’s right that we can’t wipe the phones, but we can make sure the person can’t use it as a phone. Each phone has a serial number, called an IMEI. It’s imprinted in the coding of the phone. My company allows us to block that, so that it won’t work on any carrier, with any sim card. Now when I say it won’t work, I just mean it won’t be able to make calls, use data or send text messages. It can still do everything else. The insurance company will do this as well. The unfortunate part of this is, since the phone appears to be working to the casual observer, we hear about a lot of people getting scammed on Craigslist buying ‘used’ phones that are unable to make calls once they actually try.
Years ago my wallet was stolen. Months later - after I’d long since replaced the credit cards and otherwise managed to restore things to normal - I got a slightly incoherent call from a guy who told me a long, drawn out story. “So I was in this bar, see? And I had a couple of drinks? And…”
Meanwhile I was wondering who this bozo was and why he was calling me to tell me about it. When he got the point about using the bathroom (because you know, those beers go straight through you) and the toilet not working properly, I almost hung up on him.
But I was feeling polite, so I continued to listen. FINALLY he gots to the point, which was that when he opened the toilet tank to see if he could fix the problem with the toilet running, he found my wallet floating in the tank. Evidently it had been dumped there shortly after being stolen. This makes sense - the bar is next door to the office building from which the wallet had been taken.
Anyway, I arranged to meet the guy at the bar and get the wallet, because hey, what the heck. Everything from the wallet was ruined and replaced already, but it did have my original Social Security card in it, so I figured I might as well retrieve that. (It’s been over 30 years since the wallet theft, and I still have it! [The original SS card, not the ruined wallet.])
I was young at the time and it never occurred to me to offer a reward, especially since there was nothing of value in the wallet anyway. But the guy seemed miffed. At the time I just chalked it up to him being kind of peculiar to start with, but in retrospect he probably wanted a reward. He did take the time to call me, so I guess it would have been a nice thing for me to do. Oh well.
Seems like if you found a phone the easiest thing to do is drop it by the carriers’ store. They should bea able to find thier customer. I would not ask nor accept a reward for returning a phone to its owner.
That’s nice because I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over calling the cops on the person who was refusing to return my property to me. “I found your phone, but I’m not giving it back unless you pay me.” Really? I’d just figure you stole it in the first place and call the cops. Or maybe just do a little small claims court action. Or both. I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over causing someone a metric crap ton of trouble for trying to extort me for money over something he claims he “found”.
Keep or destroy something that is not yours, has value, and you know who it belongs to. How does this not make you a thief?
I take back my vote, I wouldn’t expect a reward. Back in high school, I worked in a McDonalds and found a wallet in the parking lot stuffed with cash. I gave it to my manager and the owner showed up an hour or so later looking for his lost item. My manager gave it to him and made a point of telling the guy “there’s the kid who turned in your wallet”. The guy basically said thanks and left without any offer. This was in 1977 and there was over $200 bucks in the wallet (my manager counted it). My manager was livid that the guy gave me nothing.
Then I’m a bit jelly that you’ve never had to deal with real sociopathy, and I hope your good luck continues.
All I steal is jokes these days.
Mostly because I’m not dumb enough to actually take it. In this situation, after ascertaining whose phone it was, I would put it back where I found it and I would then offer to sell the person in question the information on where I saw it. It adds a time element to force a decision, as if they don’t buy the info right away it becomes less useful as time passes. It also gets around laws about possessing and selling stolen property.
What really gets to me on this subject is the fucking entitlement in this thread. You all seem to think you have no responsibility to take care of your own property, and you all also seem to expect that the world will return it to you for nothing. If someone dares to suggest that their time in returning your lost shit is worth money, they are called names. This actually boggles my mind.
What time? In the situation described in the OP, the finder didn’t have to take much time or trouble at all; it was the loser who took the time and trouble to track down the finder and go to his location. And “the world” didn’t return the phone for nothing: the loser had to spend time and cab fare (that he could ill afford) to get it back.
If your point is that “people should have to pay for their mistakes so that they learn not to make them,” well, Reality usually handles that aspect of things pretty well without our help. You sound like someone that hasn’t ever had anyone else do them a favor.
I found wallets on a few occassions. None of them had much money in them and I didn’t accept any rewards. One wallet had no money and the owner insinuated that I took the money. I found the wallet in an alley about 1/2 block from a gas station where the owner says he probably lost it. That pissed me off.
You sure about that last sentence? If you find an item and then hide it, refusing to reveal its whereabouts to the rightful owner - even if you’ve hidden it back in the same spot where you found it - are you sure you’re in the clear? I would think obstruction of justice (for concealing physical evidence) might apply; I’d be curious to hear from a cop on this one.
“No responsibility to take care of your own property” is a bit of a stretch. People screw up and lose valuable items once in a while; it happens to even the most attentive among us. The concept of a “social contract” has been mentioned at least once upthread, the idea being that the world is a nicer place if we don’t reflexively reduce every interpersonal transaction to a cash basis, and if everyone is willing to look out for his fellow man, then no one should feel horribly inconvenienced. Some organizations even deliberately instill this idea in their members. You hold doors open for people without expecting them to hand you a dollar, you help people pick up stuff they dropped without expecting them to buy you lunch, and you help reunite people with their lost valuables without expecting a cash payout. What goes around comes around, and someday you will be the beneficiary of a good-will gesture from your fellow man.
My own amusing entry for this thread:
I lost my wallet once. The woman who found it called me and told me where to meet her to reclaim it. When I got there she handed it back and informed me that she had taken a few bucks from it to buy herself breakfast. I didn’t complain out loud, but I thought that was rather presumptuous on her part.
If it was such a ‘hassle’ and ‘effort’ for the guy to return the phone why did he pick it up in the first place? He could have just left it there or gave it to the cab driver.
He purposefully involved himself and then wanted to bitch about not getting compensated for getting involved.
If he was sick of waiting at the bar he could have just gave it to the bartender to hold on to.