Stranger finds lost wallet—No one prepared for what they do to find owner
A Reddit post showcasing a clever method to reunite a lost wallet with its owner has captivated hundreds of thousands online.
Shared on March 31 in the subreddit r/mildlyinteresting, the post by user u/MixaLv has since garnered over 168,000 upvotes.
The post, titled "I found a wallet on a Saturday, I left a note in a way so only the real owner could contact me," was shared with an image of a handwritten note labeled "Black Wallet Found." The note features a cryptic math puzzle that, when solved correctly using a unique personal identifier, reveals the phone number of the person who found the wallet.
"You can contact me by solving this equation," the note states. Beneath it, a row of numbers is followed by a plus sign, and another row is marked "DDMMYY," with an arrow indicating it should be the owner's birthdate. Another arrow points to the space where the sum would go, saying: "my phone number." The note concludes: "On Monday, I will deliver it to the police station."
The poster's determination to track down the wallet's rightful owner is unsurprising.
In a June 2019 study in Science, more than 17,000 wallets containing various sums of money were dropped in 355 cities across 40 countries. The study found that "in virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money" and that "neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result."
The study said: "In contrast to what rationalist theories of economics predict, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. The findings also reveal a high level of civic honesty across nations."
'Simple Cryptography'
According to follow-up comments by the original poster, the wallet was found in Finland.
"This was last year. I found a wallet on a Saturday morning, so police stations were closed," u/MixaLv explained.
"Even if I left it in their mailbox, it couldn't have been retrieved until Monday. The wallet had their ID but I couldn't find their contact info, so I left this note near the spot I found it to give the owner a chance to contact me and get the wallet back earlier, without revealing my info to the public, and to prevent random people calling me trying to get the wallet."
Crucially, the number displayed on the note was not the Redditor's phone number but an encrypted version.
"It's the result of an equation of that number + their birthday in DDMMYYYY. I got the person's birthday from their ID. Only a person who knew the day, month, and year could call me, then I used the ID to verify the owner one more time."
The unorthodox tactic turned out to be effective. "The owner contacted me later that day and I verified them with the ID. I also asked the person to not share the contents of the note anywhere," the Redditor wrote in a later comment.
Though some users questioned why the finder didn't simply check the address on the ID, the poster explained that Finnish identification cards typically don't include addresses.
"Regular ID cards don't have addresses printed on them here, it's not required by law," they said. "It only had the name, DOB, SSN, country, photo, and some other unrelated info."
Efforts to find the owner through social media were also unsuccessful. "Also forgot to mention, I did try to check social media with that information, but couldn't find them," the poster added.
In a later comment, they said that they had "watched a Computerphile video on cryptography and hashing recently that gave me the idea."
"I thought it was pretty clever," they said. "Basically using simple cryptography and a private key."
'Genius'
The post has since attracted admiration from Reddit users who praised the ingenuity of the method.
U/TheHeffNerr wrote: "That's actually kind of genius," and u/Limp_Donut5337 agreed, commenting, "That is as smart as it is wholesome."
U/DiscussionMuted9941 wrote: "that was f****** incredible, how did he even come up with this??? cause its litteraly only going to be solvable by one person. its so highly unlikley for someone to have the same exact birthday and be in the same exact area that just lost a black wallet. this should be so much more common."
Newsweek reached out to u/MixaLv via Reddit for comment.
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