You've implied it's permanent transfer of ownership to the state. It's not.

From wikipedia: "Escheats are performed on a revocable basis. Thus, if property has escheated to a State but the original owner subsequently is found, escheatment is revoked and ownership of the property reverts to that original owner."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat#United_States

That is a protection. The government holds the money and you can apply for it anytime. As can your relatives. Have you never received unclaimed funds you didn't know were due to you?

Is this what the 419 scam stories are based on?

> Have you never received unclaimed funds you didn't know were due to you?

No... have you?

Federal unclaimed property site: https://www.usa.gov/unclaimed-money

State unclaimed property index (find your state site at the top): https://unclaimed.org/search/#

Yes, I have. My state has a website where you can search for and claim your funds back. It's quite easy.

Happens all the time. They even used to publish lists of unclaimed funds in the paper. It's occurred to me twice in my lifetime.

I've got a $200 check sitting on my desk from this very thing.

Only on HN would you need to specify "active account" for such a clear cut analogy. Two replies and both are picking that nit.

Apple is admitting regardless of activity, studios can revoke their license to content, removing content from your active account

Threads with analogies are one of my favorite HN idiosyncrasies because they’re almost guaranteed to be followed up with something along the lines of “a better analogy would be $materiallySimilarAnalogy” or “that’s not a good analogy because $immaterialDetail”. Just an endearing quirk of HN users to have a tendency to be overly-precise, I think.

I had 19¢ in a bank account I that sat dormant for 4 year. Still there when I logged in and started using the account again.

Let's hope they don't close your account.

In Futurama's "A Fishful of Dollars"[1] Fry discovers that the $0.93 he had in his account when he was cryogenically frozen in the year 2,000 had grown at 2.25% a year to almost $4.3 billion when he was reawakened 1,000 years later.

Yes, the match checks out[2]: 0.93 * (1.0225 ^ 1000) ≈ 4,283,508,449.71

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fishful_of_Dollars

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.93+*+%281.0225+%5E+1...

Of course that episode conveniently overlooks inflation. In reality, 4 billion dollars in the year 3000 would barely buy you a stick of Big Pink - the only gum made with the breath-freshening power of ham.

It's not an inactive account if it is being logged in.

I didn't log in for 4 years.

would be nice if apple/amazon/google did that too