At least once per day, my mother (a lovely woman) sends me 'important' email she’s received that frequently turn out to be unfounded rumors, urban legends, or digital-age chain letters. So I was a bit skeptical when she sent me an email to tell me that she had just found $44 that belonged to me via www.missingmoney.com.

Turns out that this was legitimate! When I moved out of an apartment fourteen years ago, Bell Atlantic tried to send me a refund check, but I did not provide them with a forwarding address. The money been sitting with the Pennsylvania Treasurer’s Office for over a decade, and I was able to claim it by filing a simple form online.

Companies are required by law to turn unclaimed property over to the state, which then holds onto it until it is reunited with the proper owner. State treasurers currently hold over $33 billion in unclaimed and abandoned property, which includes securities, missed dividends, insurance and lawsuit payouts, refund and deposit checks, and safe deposit box contents. (The State of California is holding unclaimed property belonging to over 11 million people!) Most of the listings are for less than $100 and you can often claim them just by filling out an online form. However, depending on the amount and state, you may need to prove that you are the genuine owner, which could require digging up very well-aged proof of residence or ownership.

Missing Money and Unclaimed.org are both free online services that help you to search unclaimed property databases state by state. I also found the California Controller's Web site to be very user friendly. Be sure to check with any state that you've ever lived in, and if you have a maiden name, search for that was well.

Thrilled by my $44 discovery, I did quick searches in the other states where I’ve lived and also found a $75 lawsuit award waiting for me in California, plus $14 that was sitting in a PayPal account that my husband had long forgotten he had. Plus, I uncovered missing money belonging to four of my cousins, an uncle and my father-in-law too!

It was exciting discovering this money with my brief online treasure hunt, but of course I would have preferred not to have "lost" it in the first place.