Honest Student Finds and Turns in $10,000

Many students are struggling to pay off their tuition, yet one young gentleman turns in $10 000 after finding it beside an ATM machine.

Finding $10 000 on the ground would be too good to be true for almost anyone. However, when Jaime Hawkins, a finance student in Halifax, found the “loaf-of-bread-sized” stack of $20 bills next to a bank machine, he immediately realized that he couldn't keep it.

“I was just so overwhelmed with the amount of money,” Hawkins, 29, said today, about four weeks after the incident. “It just felt like the right thing to do to hand it over. I had this little voice inside of me that said, ‘It’s not yours. Hand it in.’ ” The stack of money was wrapped in elastic bands and barely visible beneath a shelving unit. It was mistakenly left behind by 2 security guards while refilling the atm at a student building, Hawkins said he “feels good” about his decision even though he is now strapped for cash. An extra $10,000 would have come in handy, especially for a student with a debt load of close to $50,000.

“I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I was an idiot for handing it in,” he said, laughing. “But at the same time, they say, ‘You’re a good guy for doing that.’ ”

“It’s nice to know there’s honest people in the world with integrity, whose mothers raised them right,” said company spokeswoman Robin Steinberg, adding she believed the money had been there for “a very short time span.”