Why Do Kind Strangers Return Our Wallets?

Dear Anonymous Kind Stranger Who Didn’t Include a Return Address:

Thank you for mailing my wallet to South Korea from London, where I lost it a few months ago — possibly in a pub? — while visiting my in-laws with my wife and our toddlers. When I saw the envelope and your handwritten note waiting for me at The New York Times office in Seoul, I gasped.

“Just amazing,” my wife texted back when I told her the news. “Literally no return address?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have underestimated your capacity for kindness, stranger. People around the world find and return lost property to people like me all the time, directly or through intermediaries, often without telling us who they are.

So what are the odds of getting our lost wallets back, and why do people bother returning them? Here are three things I learned when I investigated.

You’re better off losing wallets in some places than others.

Comprehensive data on lost wallets is scarce, but official data from a handful of big cities offer some clues — and contrasts.

In London, an average of more than 2,000 lost wallets and purses were recovered each month by the city’s transport authority during the 2021 fiscal year, the data show. New York City’s transit system received an average of more than 400 lost wallets per month in 2023.