Hi everyone! We’re very excited to launch Claimdog today on Product Hunt. Claimdog lets you search to see if a business owes you money. There is over $60 billion of “unclaimed property” or “missing money” in the United States, and our mission is to increase the awareness and transparency around this issue.
Unclaimed property is created when a business owes an individual or organization money, but wasn’t able to get it to them successfully. For example, say you forget to cash a check -- where does that money go? State governments require that a business must, by law, turn it over to them after a period of time has passed. Uncashed checks, stock dividends, checks to sent to old addresses, abandoned bank accounts or PayPal accounts, and inheritances are all common sources of these unclaimed property.
The numbers are staggering -- there is over $60 billion owed. In California alone, approximately 32.5 million individuals / organizations are owed. We don’t know the exact figure, but across the US, between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 people have money owed to them. So try it out and we’d love to hear your feedback!
@dfinzer Congrats on launching, Devin! Great that you're able to help people claim money! Curious, how are *you* making money?
ps, Nice post about celebrities who are owed money. Kayne could use the $37 owed from the Foot Locker: https://claimdog.wordpress.com/2...
@dfinzer you should have a feature where you can subscribe to your name and be alerted of future potential claims. For example I don't have anything to claim today but I would want to know about anything in the future I could claim.
Very cool. I think you should tweet this to Kanye West.. Just noticed that he has pretty much money to claim. Will surely help him get back on his feet :)
Looked at Texas and Minnesota (the last two states I've lived in) and in both cases was told that they don't release their records. Any way to put what states are (and aren't) served on your main page to avoid folks wasting time?
@naweg Hey NaweG, thanks for checking out Claimdog! We’re having some load issues in connection with our launch today, so several states are temporarily down. We’re trying to get them up and running as soon as possible. Please stay tuned!
@augustnoble For California, you'll get a check in the mail (a bit old school, but hey - free money). Other states typically do mail checks as well, I believe.
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Cool product, nothing like getting free money. - I think one of the main issues with competitors is validating who you are and what you do. How do I know you are real? How do I know you are not a scam? How do I know you aren't just trying to get me to sign up for something. You are most likely targeting poor / young / old users so with that comes a level of responsibility.
@patrickcoombe Hey Patrick, a very legitimate concern and one we take very seriously. There are scam sites out there. Our mission with Claimdog is to bring more awareness and transparency to unclaimed property / missing money. We're trying by being transparent about ourselves, as well as linking to primary sources like relevant government websites -- both on our blog (http://bit.ly/1oxSEEf) as well as within the search process in Claimdog. We're interested in any other ideas you might have to build trust!
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Dang, nobody owes me money! At least in California. Dumb question, do results differ by state? Any chance we can search every state at once?
@_codyjoseph We definitely want to make it possible to search every state at once (way more convenient!). Results do differ a bit state by state, in terms of what information the state provides about the unclaimed money. For example, some states provide the exact dollar amount, others only provide a range.
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Just thought I would share my two cents. I shared the link and have no way of knowing if anyone has claimed money using my referral link though I can track the number of clicks using bitly, which I am. Secondly, soon after sharing I was bombarded with messages about helping to "scam" people by asking for their SSN number. While I took a leap of faith and trusted the website and processed my claims, I would love to know how you address the people who are reluctant to give you their SSN?
@ryanmtaylor Thanks for the feedback! We’re working on a better way for users to view the tracking of their referral links and will keep you posted when that’s available. We totally recognize that SSN submission is a big ask; if we didn’t absolutely need it for processing claims in California, we would’t require it. Our goal with Claimdog is to develop a trusted brand for safeguarding people’s money; that, of course, takes time. We totally understand that folks may be reluctant, but we also hope that the success stories from users like yourself will help get people over that hump.
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