Millions of Pounds Go Unclaimed Each Year

Have you ever stopped to think about just how much money circulating in the economy is pretty much just some money which doesn’t really have an owner? Well it probably should have a rightful owner, but there’s an awful lot of money which goes unclaimed each year, to the delight of many financial institutions including banks, insurance service providers and even charity custodians, believe it or not.

It isn’t only the financial sector and charities however who constantly have to deal with millions of pounds in unclaimed cash each year and while it’s a topic which a lot of these institutions can pretty much keep under wraps, one has to spare a thought for those rightful owners of that money who could really do with it. National lotteries surprisingly have to deal with stockpiles of cash in unclaimed prize money as well, both locally and abroad. Lotto winners don’t come forward for a number of different reasons, some of which might surprise you really.

You’d perhaps naturally expect some of those smaller lottery prize money winnings to stack up into millions of pounds in unclaimed money, which is definitely the case as many people just don’t care to go and collect what they deem to be small change, but there are quite a lot of full jackpots which have gone unclaimed as well. Leading reasons include the death of the winning lottery card holder between the purchase of their ticket and the draw (or after the draw), loss of what turned out to be the winning lottery ticket, disbelief at the fact that the winner does indeed hold the winning ticket and, believe it or not, the winning lottery ticket holder having played the lottery so much without winning that they just don’t bother to check if they have the winning numbers anymore.

All of this makes for some interesting reading, perhaps a bit funny in some instances, but things get a bit more serious if we turn our focus back to the financial sector in discussion of the millions of pounds of money which go unclaimed each year. Forget the dormant bank accounts which eventually go on to get closed down or scenarios similar to that — with the likes of specialist financial claims companies like Stanton Fisher having recovered over £80 million in claims for clients in a period of just six short years, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

These are claims related to mis-sold financial services products like packaged bank accounts, PPI claims and even claims related to flight delays, but a whole lot more people never come forward to start the process of claiming for their compensation. Unlike the case of unclaimed lottery winnings, this is some money which originally belonged to the people who are in effect being milked and while some of these monies may not seem like much, for the financial institutions doing the milking it all adds up to colossal “extra” profits.

Still, nobody would turn down an extra £3,000 pounds in compensation which is rightfully due to them. You can do a lot with that type of money.

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