I was in real estate. We collected earnest money from a particular buyer, and held it in an escrow account. The deal fell through, and we were required to return the money. However, the buyer ghosted us. We couldn’t reach them to return it.

Our escrow account is audited by the state. We have to account for every transaction to or from that account. If we don’t have paperwork to justify the transfer, we could get fined or have our licenses revoked. We didn’t have paperwork for this buyer, so we had no legal authority to do anything with this money.

Any account with any business can potentially have the same problem: a legal obligation to transfer money to a known person, but no way of actually completing the transfer.

The solution is to transfer the money to the state’s “unclaimed funds” division. When the state audits our account, we can show that these funds are the state’s problem, not ours.

The funds I’ve found were from a couple class action suits where I was apparently a member of the class. It amounted to tens of dollars. They were apparently filed long after I had moved, but I had never updated my address with the defendants.