I have been trying to let people know about this and to find out more about what's going on.
What law brought crypto into unclaimed assets?
How long has this been going on?
For me personally, I wasn't able to log in since 2023. Finally got in this year and saw in 2025 they gave me a notice they would take funds out. This was after seeing coins sent out of my Coinbase account with no wallet address or merchant listed.
So during the fraud process with support I looked for a phishing email. The chat support seemed to not know what was going on due to anti money laundering regulations.
Coinbase reached out to me when I posted about it on Reddit.
I think, it's a Colorado issue though. Not that I haven't had issues with Coinbase in the past.
Lol...
It's every state, and they do it for all unclaimed property.
They're not stealing it, every state has a website. Type in your name and it will list every amount and where it came from. Prove you're that person by supplying current banking info in your name, and they'll send you the money.
Edit:
You should probably check if you have anything else:
https://unclaimedproperty.colorado.gov/app/claim-search
Like, say you forgot to close a checking account with $20 a decade ago. Eventually the bank doesn't want it, they turn it into the state. The state doesn't care if you get it, so they wait for people to ask.
yeah was going to say something like this. good thing to check out in any state you ever owned anything or if like your parents did and they passed away.
https://imgur.com/a/2KN4vmn
They don't list it.
How do you think it works?
its all sorts of property. jewelery and such left in deposit boxes and such.
Right. There are many kinds of unclaimed property.
How do you think they organize something that's considered unclaimed?
What do they do to return it and what happens if no one claims it?
Maybe you think I'm not familiar with Colorado's government and made a post to fix a personal issue with Coinbase.
as far as I can tell they just sorta list it for awhile and then it goes to the state. its sorta on you to prove its yours.
That's what I was thinking until I looked into it.
It's unclear who handles it.
If it's the Treasury or Department of Revenue. Or both.
For all Coinbase accounts they only list a single account based on Sacramento. So I'm not sure how my account got linked to Colorado and yet unclaimed. Or how they claimed a Sacramento account in Colorado.
They do this for BlockFi too. I figure if I can't get them to find my Coinbase I can at least do the process there.
They returned like $1 billion in unclaimed property, but I suspect they retain a lot more in the process.
They way I understand if if it nots claimed within some period of time then the state takes it.
What do you think happens after?
Do you think it's saved in a crypto wallet?
Like Colorado has a PePe wallet with financial statements. 😅
I think they brought in crypto, but without the protections other assets have. It took a long time to protect the dollar. Let alone the banks and that's debatable if they ever did.
Are you familiar with cash flow and accounting?
Ultimately the agency will decide when to sell. Its like this with all the assets. Some may even auction it as that is common with assets. Its basically up to the agency at that point. They generally don't hold onto things as if its an investment. At best they may hold off it is historically low or such. State investing of assets is pretty much a seperate thing.
It sounds similar to the automotive auction process then?
Foreclosures.
I did some deep dives into those since 2017, but banking and anything else I am just beginning to make CORA requests on.
at this point we are well beyond what im sure about. Alls I know is my state and I assume most states do the same. Mine has laws about when property is considered abandoned and then takes possession and then has an onus to look for the owner and get it returned but there is some sort of time limit where it then becomes a possesion of the state. They might keep interest and such when it comes to money. The amount is based on when they took possession.
Gotcha.
I think, there are major differences between States.
Have you ever read Thinking in Systems?
The issue I've been seeing is the protections that bring together State legislature on important legal issues have largely been dismantled.
It used to be the Circuit Courts and even the supreme Court worked to set clearer guidelines on recurring important issues. Now it seems there are many times less Supreme Court cases and the Circuit Courts wait for two Circuit courts to disagree before they bump it to the supreme Court.
I don't know everything, but that seems to be what's happened.
The feedback loops are all broken.
Civil immunity was invented by judges. It was never law. We use 'clearly established' cases to counter that, but many of those a recursive and the entire system is broken.
For a case to be clearly established there must be another clearly established case to point to. So it was never meant to work from my understanding.
So Colorado is easily able to do as many Fourth Amendment seizures violations as they like. Until someone gets crypto "Clearly Established" we could be stuck with this.
It would be interesting to see the situation in your State. Not that I wanna pry. Because Utah for instance is very similar, but a Utah flavor of these issues. Same Circuit Court.
Does all this sound crazy?
No. One of the biggest complaints outside of clearly ignoring the constitution with the current scotus is they also do not set any guidelines for lower courts to use. Likely because they want to reverse the whole thing if someone else gets in charge and if they set guidelines that would be harder. I doubt anything would change with laws around abandoned property though as those have been around a long time and go back to much better run courts and governments. This is the thing with bank accounts. If you don't log in or go to a branch or interact with it for some period of time the state will take possesion. It takes like 3 years though and the institution is required to warn you about it. Much like you saw here. Presumably once told the person will go in or log on or call and verify its not abandoned.
Yea I think the upper courts have been dismantling a lot of protections. What I saw was they sent it to the State Courts which aren't as prepared to handle these cases and it takes much longer to get anywhere. For the cases that should already be illegal and ruled on this is kinda disheartening.
At the same time, I realized it's a great opportunity to strengthen the States. If SCOTUS is refusing to set guidelines then community organized efforts across States have much more power to do so. There is always the ability to change public consensus on these issues. I think in the past it was manipulated to give a false consensus.
They also abused global tech laws under the threat of tarifs and that that has lost a good deal of potency as well.
As far as the 3 years and everything with the State and Banks, I've checked into this somewhat and there are ultimately no protections and limited enforcement in these jurisdictions. The DA's often won't even file complaints they receive let alone investigate. Our State AG plays by a similar handbook and receives complaints and never releases them. No investigations they weren't already planning to do.
We have some bad corruption because the AG takes taxpayer dollars to fund lawsuits against the president's administration. It's sounds good because he is taking on important issues, but ultimately there's zero transparency into how he is doing that.
Generally what happens is the orgs solving an issue never solve it enough to lower our "need" for them.
I wish I could say that I don't think the prior, current and next AG are using this playbook.
If they wanted to help us they would need to bring transparency to the City insurance pool and consider defunding. At least that's how I'd start.
I'm sure if more people understood these insurance pools there would be better solutions.