Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink’s brief turn on a Dateline NBC segment Monday was successful beyond the agency’s expectations. She presented as part of a story called "You Might Be Rich!" on efforts to return millions of dollars worth of unclaimed property to its rightful owners, including a Purple Heart that belongs to a Vietnam veteran living in Ocala.

The segment ran Monday night. By Tuesday, Sink’s state Bureau of Unclaimed Property web site, with a searchable database of unclaimed items, was getting so much traffic (45,781 strange visitors in a day) that it crashed for an hour, CFO spokesman Kevin Cate said. The site is back up, with

a note that attributes heavy traffic to the Dateline NBC segment.

Sink’s office coordinated interviews with Florida’s NBC affiliates to draw attention to billions of dollars in cash, stocks, bonds, jewelry and other property sitting unclaimed in bank safety deposit boxes. The CFO’s "story pitch" included video of a state vault filled with unclaimed items at an undisclosed Tallahassee location.

Following an exhaustive search for property owners, the state will auction more than 500,000 unclaimed items at a major auction Aug. 2 at Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay. Since 1961, Florida has received $2.7-billion in unclaimed property. 

 

Original post by Steve Bousquet