There are plenty of schemes out there that offer free—or at least easy—money. One should always check, as Hastings resident Vivienne Heston did when she received a letter from County Legislator David Imamura last year, telling her that an unspecified amount of her money was being held in the state’s coffers. Was this another scam? Or legit?
Turns out it was the real thing. While she missed a county-sponsored workshop held at the Hastings Public Library to assist residents in claiming money that had their name on it, she managed to successfully file a claim on the New York State Comptroller’s web site. “It was very easy to type in my name and submit a claim,” recalls Heston. “The refund came by check several weeks later.”
Heston’s found money (around $200) wasn’t life-changing, like a winning Mega Millions lottery ticket, but it wasn’t peanuts either. Nor was the $38 and change in the name of Anna Cooper’s late husband. An Irvington resident, Cooper did make it down last December to the Hastings Public Library where Imamura and staffers from the county helped her log onto the unclaimed funds link of Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s web site. As she was leaving the building, she saw State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins—whose presence was a pretty good sign that this was an authorized operation. Weeks went by but she eventually got the check in the mail, reflecting what she described as “some kind of health insurance refund.”…