What To Do If You Find Money On The Floor

Let this be a example to us all: if you find money on the street, peck it up and keep it, you could get yourself a criminal record. Because that's exactly what happened to 23-year-previous Nicole Bailey, when a grouping of constabulary officers who were clearly having a unpretending day down the base caught her in the act upon on CCTV and definite to track her down.

METRO reports that the young woman was filmed picking skyward a £20 note off the floor in Blurton, Stoke-on-River Trent, which it turned out had initially belonged to a man who'd fresh withdrawn it from a Johnny Cash machine but accidentally born it.

The gentleman went back to the betray where atomic number 2'd got the cash, but the staff hadn't seen IT anywhere, and then decided to ascertain the CCTV. Upon review of this, Nicole was seen picking it up, so police called her in for an audience.

After at the start denying that she'd taken the money (though come connected, you'd have to be a nonesuch not to pick a £20 note up if you just saw it lying there, apparently ownerless connected the street), officers showed Nicole the footage and she eventually confessed to her heinous crime.

What next? Close up in the slammer if we block to minimal brain dysfunction on the 5p charge for a plastic bag?

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A a consequence, the young woman was called into court connected a stealing charge to which she pleaded guilty. And while, yeah, we tumble - the money wasn't hers - it does seem a undersize over the top to hold an entire court hearing over it.

The legal definition of stealing is "the dishonest appropriation of holding belonging to other with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it," and not that I'm profession to follow any kind of criminal lawyer or anything, but I would struggle to see how her actions were "dishonest". It wasn't atomic number 3 if the sincere possessor of the £20 sawing machine her pick it up and asked her for it back. There was hardly active knavery involved.

And mitigator Simon Dykes seems to think the livelong matter was blown out of proportion, too, saying she'd have been better with a police caution. Helium did, withal, confirm that there's a common misconception about just how statutory that kind of behaviour is. "She didn't know who the money belonged to. People don't realise pick up something you have plant amounts to a theft. She has been quite naive in doing soh," he said.

And if Nicole has been dewy-eyed about it, how more other people have previously been, too?

You could face a criminal record if you find money on the floor

100% not worth it

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Nonetheless, Nicole had to go to court, where she was given a contingent discharge and has been successful to pay £175 in costs and charges. So what started tabu as a stroke of luck finding £20 ended up costing her almost nine times that amount.

So it might represent worth remembering this next time you find cash on the floor; you're superior taking it to a police station than pocketing it yourself and risking a fine, a court incase and a criminal record. Blimey.

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Catriona Harvey-Jenner Features Editor True cat is Cosmopolitan UK's features editor covering women's issues, health and current affairs.