So, a friend rents out some houses and recently had to evict some people.
Upon cleanup she has found a large collection of car keys. Some with fobs, some without. 20-30 in total. Various makes and models.
I can’t think of a legitimate reason to have such a collection.
So, what should she do? Should she turn them in to the police? Throw them away and forget about them? Try to give them to car dealers (Can fobs be reprogrammed for another car)?
Is one of them for a 2005 volvo s40?
You might want to contact the local PD, but my guess is that they won’t be interested unless they are looking for someone who is stealing keys and later stealing cars. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for them…
Possibly!
This is what we were leaning toward. This is a very rural area that doesn’t have a local police force. The Pennsylvania State Police work this area and I feel like they would care even less than local cops.
Do you have any auto junkyards in your area? I’m not sure if the fobs can be reprogrammed, but if they can, a junkyard would likely have a use for them. Also check ebay. You may be able to sell them yourself one at a time.
My father has a box like this. It’s not difficult or nefarious; he just got a new car literally every year for about 50 years, and always had a spare key squirreled away somewhere. One day he consolidated them all into one box. So, box of random keys.
Though unlikely, maybe it’s a collection for the sake of collecting. People collect stupid things.
When I was a kid I collected interest-looking keys, mostly skeleton keys.
Maybe donate it to people who do steampunk cosplay? Okay, so they’re not fancy Victorian keys, but they could maybe be used somehow.
When my stolen & totaled car was recovered this spring, I went to the junkyard to remove what was left of my property in it. Included were 6 different key chains, with a car key plus a variety of other keys on each one*. Most of them also had bar-coded tags for frequent-purchases clubs from local gas station chains, grocery stores, and one high school. I believe these businesses could have scanned them and identified the owners of these keys, but they obviously wouldn’t give out that info to just anyone. So I gave these keys to the local police, who said they would be able to get that info, and return them to the owners (and maybe ask them what they were doing riding in my stolen car).