How do unclaimed property finder firms find you?

State unclaimed property divisions are required by law to publish the names of owners they're holding money for. The whole point of escheatment is to reunite owners with property; secrecy would defeat the purpose. So every state runs a free, public search portal — Texas at the Comptroller's site, California at the State Controller's site, New York at the Office of the State Comptroller, and so on through all fifty states plus DC. The portals are designed for citizens to type in their own names. Nothing stops a finder firm from typing in everyone else's names too. Some firms scrape the public lists in bulk; some run targeted lookups against new reports each quarter. Either way, the underlying data is the same data you'd see if you ran the search yourself. The finder has no information advantage. They have a workflow advantage — they're industrialized, you're not.

The state's record shows your name and your last-known address — which is often years stale, because the property only became unclaimed in the first place once the holder lost track of you. The finder needs a current address to send the letter. This is where commercial data comes in. There's an entire B2B industry built on consumer address data: USPS National Change of Address (NCOA), credit-header data from the credit bureaus, voter rolls in some states, property tax records, and aggregator databases like LexisNexis Accurint or TLO. A finder firm runs your name and old address through one of these services, gets back a current address with high confidence, and prints a label. Total cost per lookup: a few cents. This is also why the same person sometimes gets letters from three different finder firms about the same property. Multiple firms scraped the same state list, ran the same address match, and all decided you were worth a stamp.

Read a finder letter carefully. It usually does four things: vaguely identifies an unspecified asset ("funds being held in your name"), implies a deadline or risk of loss, requires you to call or sign before disclosing the source or amount, and offers to handle everything for a percentage. The vagueness is intentional. If the letter said "You have $312 at the Texas Comptroller, file at claimittexas.org for free," you'd file directly. By withholding the amount and the state agency, the firm forces you to engage with them to learn what they already know. The urgency is also manufactured. States almost never destroy or absorb unclaimed property; most hold it indefinitely. There is no ticking clock. The letter implies one because urgency overrides skepticism.

Mostly yes, with one large carve-out. Finder firms are regulated under each state's unclaimed property statute. Most states cap the fee a finder can charge — Texas at 10% under Tex. Prop. Code § 74.507, California at 10% under Cal. Civ. Proc. Code § 1582, New York at 15% under N.Y. Aband. Prop. Law § 1416, Illinois at 10% under 765 ILCS 1026/15-1302, Pennsylvania at 15% under 72 P.S. § 1301.24. Florida is one of the highest at 20% under Fla. Stat. § 717.135. The carve-out is the 24-month bar. In Alabama (Ala. Code § 35-12-95), Georgia (Ga. Code § 44-12-214), Pennsylvania, and many other states, finders are explicitly prohibited from contracting with an owner about a specific property until 24 months after the property has been reported to the state. The reason: lawmakers wanted to give owners a free, two-year window to find the property themselves before any percentage-taker could insert themselves. If the letter you received references property reported in the last two years, the contract the firm is asking you to sign is almost certainly unenforceable in your state.

Easy: look it up yourself. Take the name on the letter — usually yours, sometimes a relative's — and search the state's official portal directly. We deep-link to every state's official site from our state directory. If the letter mentions a specific state, search that one first. If it doesn't, run a multi-state sweep at our search tool, which queries every participating state in one pass. If the search returns a match, the letter is real and you've just confirmed it without paying anyone. File the claim directly with the state. If the search returns nothing, the letter may be a phishing attempt or text scam, which is increasingly common as scammers learn how the legitimate finder business operates.

States have tried, and failed, mostly because the finder industry has lobbied effectively against outright bans. The compromise structure — fee caps plus the 24-month bar plus disclosure requirements — is the result of decades of back-and-forth in state legislatures. There's also a defensible argument for letting finders exist in narrow circumstances: heir cases involving multi-generational chains, oil and gas royalty entitlements, and stock claims with corporate-action history are sometimes genuine investigative work. The fee in those cases reflects real labor. The problem is that the same regulatory structure that permits finders to do hard work also permits them to charge 10% to 30% for typing your name into a free state portal. Most letters fall into the second category. The state's solution is to make the underlying data public so any owner who knows where to look can skip the middleman.

There is no proprietary database of state unclaimed property. The data is the state data; nothing else exists. A firm claiming proprietary access is either confused or marketing. What some firms do have is internal workflow tools — scrapers, address-match pipelines, mailing automation, and lead-tracking software. Those are operational efficiencies, not data sources. They make the firm faster at processing volume. They don't give the firm any property the state isn't already publishing. The one genuine exception is heir-research firms working on pre-escheat property — assets a holder hasn't yet reported to the state, that the firm has identified through commercial channels (probate filings, tax-lien databases, abandoned-account audits). That work is real and the fee can sometimes be justified. But once the property has been reported to a state, it's on a public list. No firm has secret access to a public list.

No. State unclaimed property is your money — not the state's. Most states hold it indefinitely, but "indefinitely" doesn't mean it's growing. The vast majority of states (including California, where they stopped paying interest in 2003) keep all earnings on the float and pay you back the principal only. Every year you leave it sitting is a year the state earns interest you don't see. Filing the claim takes about twenty minutes once you've located the property. The state mails a check. There's no fee to you. If the amount is meaningful — and the average claim returned in 2025 was several hundred dollars — that twenty minutes pays better than almost any other use of the time. Ignore the finder letter. Don't ignore the property.

Three steps: - Search your name at our multi-state tool or directly at the state portal mentioned in the letter (find it on our state directory). - If the property exists, file the claim yourself with the state. The form is on the portal, the documents are standard (ID, proof of address history, sometimes a notarized signature), and the state pays out directly to you with no percentage withheld. - If you've already signed a finder contract, check whether your state's rescission window lets you cancel. Many states give you a statutory cooling-off period; some void contracts signed within the 24-month bar entirely. The finder letter is an invitation to overpay for paperwork. Decline the invitation. The 50-state map shows which jurisdictions hold the most unclaimed property and how to file directly in each.

Finder firms find you because the law requires the state to make your name findable. They are not detectives. They are mailers running a templated process against a public list, charging a percentage to do what you can do for free in twenty minutes. The one thing the letter doesn't tell you is the 24-month bar — the rule in most states that says the firm can't even legally contract with you yet. Once you know that rule, you understand the entire business: it's built on hoping you don't know the rule. Now you know.