US Company Shares Escheated from Brokerage A/C

O

Obairchrua

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I just discovered that shares I hold in a US multinational have been escheated from my brokerage a/c. I believe it is because they deemed my a/c to be inactive. I have held these for years now and have always kept the W8BEN forms up to date via this a/c so not sure exactly what I should have done differently to prevent this happening.

Does anyone here have any prior experience of this or how to proceed in reclaiming these?
 
If you're logging in to file W8BENs or check the balance I would have thought that would be enough to keep the account ticking over. Were you getting dividends via bank transfer - if they were sending them via cheque to an old address and they weren't being lodged that might have triggered it perhaps.

It could be the case the state has already have sold your shares (but hopefully not), but I'd say be prepared for that.

Since you've been logging in it sounds like they've been recently echeated. Here's a far worse case where they'd been echeated years previously as someone was following Warren Buffet's advice to buy shares and forget about them for 20 years. (Do not do that with a US broker)

www.npr.org

When Your Abandoned Estate Is Possessed By A State, That's Escheat

States are getting more aggressive claiming abandoned property to use for state purposes, a process known as escheat. But sometimes the holdings don't feel so abandoned to the people who own them.
www.npr.org www.npr.org

One bit of advice was
"look up the words lost money and the name of any state where you've lived, you can search for yourself on your state's unclaimed property Web site"

in your case maybe you could look up the state your company is incorporated but not sure if that will work.
 
Thanks for the responses.

I don’t have specific records of my logins but my W8BENs were done through the a/c so there is a digital footprint.

Broker site directed me to a US State abandoned / unclaimed property website where I initiated a search and managed to locate a number of abandoned properties in my name and address. It doesn’t detail what the properties are at this stage but I’m in the process of claiming them.

I’ll report back with how I get on.

BTW, I just heard similar happened to a work colleague a few weeks ago. I haven’t fully researched why its happened but will as soon as I can recover the stuff.
 
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