Police seek man who made off with $140,000 accidentally left behind by ATM employee

Police in New Jersey are looking for a man who took a bag containing $141,000 accidentally left behind by an employee of an ATM company. Surveillance video shows the costly mistake made by the employees of ATMForUs.com in Mahwah. It shows a worker leaving his office on his way to replenish ATMs.

He was carrying the large sum of cash in a small, unmarked bag, police said. The video shows him setting down the satchel, walking around to the back of the car and then getting in and taking off without the bag, which was filled with $10 and $20 bills. “At some point, the person who was supposed to have the bag realized that it wasn’t in the car with him
"But at that point, he was seven miles away so he called back to the office to see if it was still at the kerbside where he had left it,” said Mahwah police Officer William Hunt. The video then shows the passenger of a white GMC Savana work van picking up the bag full of money up and driving away. Surveillance video shows that the van was picking up discarded tires from another nearby business just minutes before, police said.

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“It was really just a stroke of luck, or misfortune, for them that this van happened to be driving by shortly after the money was left at the curb,” Hunt said. Police say once the worker who left the money behind returned back to the building and realized what had happened, they needed to call an ambulance for him. Police are hoping whoever took the bag will return it. “Anytime you find property that’s discarded on the side of the road, it’s not just fair game for you to pick it up and say, ‘Well, you left it, I found it,'” Hunt said.