Man finds wallet with $2,000 and returns it to owner. But he only cared about a piece of paper inside

Finding a wallet loaded with cash is like winning a lottery. While the human instinct says "finders keepers," many overcome it to do the right thing. This is what happened to a Reddit user, who found a wallet lying on the ground, outside a store. While he counted the cash, he did not look beyond it. Turns out, he missed a piece of paper that was worth more than all the dollars.

Here's how a piece of paper could be worth more than money

Reddit's user u/whiskeyfordinner shared his story and said that the incident happened way back in 2001 when he was walking out of a store. He wrote that while looking down at his receipt, he saw a wallet sitting on the crosswalk. As he picked it up, he couldn't see anyone around who could claim the wallet. He noticed that it had a pile of $100 bills which looked like it would have been close to $2,000.

He said that while walking to his car, he heard a man "frantically ask his wife" about his wallet. Thus, the Redditor went up to him and asked what the wallet looked like. When the man's description matched the wallet, the Redditor returned it to the owner.

The ecstatic owner promptly offered the Redditor some money as a reward for his honesty. When he refused the first $100, the man pulled out two more bills and thrusted it on the Redditor.

"I don't care about the damn money, this has my paperwork for a Porsche I bought. Can't get the car without it!" the Redditor recalled the man saying. He added that he happily took the cash and used it to buy his girlfriend a nice Valentine's gift. "So I got paid to holiday shop," he wrote at the end.

Several other users on the thread also shared similar stories of finding money, most of which was returned to the rightful owners. "I saw an old guy drop a bank envelope outside a bank before going in. Picked it up, saw £1000 (~$1,300) written on it in pen, and took it to him. God knows if there were a thousand in there or what. He was very grateful though," wrote one user u/WhyGamingWhy.

Are people still honest?

Back in 2019, a scientific study was conducted to see the extent of civic honesty across the globe. The study published in the Science Journal performed an experiment in which 17,000 wallets with different amounts of money were randomly distributed in 355 cities across 40 countries.

While experts suggest that tough economies and poor living conditions may cause people to keep the money they found, in the study, people who found wallets with larger sums returned them. Thus, as seen in the Reddit thread, the study proved that there is a greater level of civic honesty across the world than what most people believe.

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