TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A woman was very grateful that most of the NT$510,000 in cash (US$17,850) she inadvertently dropped on a New Taipei street on Tuesday night (March 15) was picked up by passersby and returned to her.
The 42-year-old woman, surnamed Zhuo (卓), had received a loan of NT$500,000 from her friends, which she intended to use to open a drink shop, CNA reported. However, when she was riding her scooter on New Taipei Boulevard in Xinzhuang District sometime after 7 p.m., she unknowingly dropped her backpack containing the borrowed NT$500,000 cash, her own NT$10,000 cash, debit cards, and ID documents. As the backpack was not properly zipped up, its contents were scattered around the street, per CNA.
About 10 passersby joined an effort to pick up what had been dropped out of the backpack, and they returned the lost cash and all the ID documents to a local police station. As the amount of the cash picked up was large, police borrowed a money counting machine from a convenience store to count the retrieved money, which came to NT$499,967, according to the CNA report.
After the incident, Zhuo took to Facebook to say that she got a phone call from a stranger on her way home on Tuesday night, and the person on the phone asked her whether she had lost a blue backpack. The caller also told her that the banknotes were flying all over the street, with more than 10 people picking them up.
The caller said they were doing their best to help pick up the banknotes, but there was no guarantee that all the money would be found, urging the woman to promptly head to the police station to reclaim what she had lost.
Zhuo said in the Facebook post that her heart sank after receiving the notification, thinking that she would be lucky to have half of the money back and that she would probably spend the rest of her life paying back debts. After she rushed to the police station and reclaimed her lost money, she kept thanking four good Samaritans at the station who had joined in the money recovering efforts, per CNA.