The case for investor alarm is stark: states are rewriting unclaimed-property rules to take custody of securities from people who are demonstrably reachable and still collecting dividends. The risk is that the same laws sold as consumer protection are generating measurable revenue for state budgets, and the two motives are impossible to separate.
How dormancy rules changed
Computershare, one of the country's largest stock transfer agents, notes that most states once waited seven years before classifying a securities account as abandoned. Today more than half use three years. The more consequential shift is in the trigger itself. States have largely moved from a "lost" standard, requiring evidence such as returned mail, to an "inactivity" standard that can be satisfied simply by the account going quiet. Computershare calls the trend "unfortunate."
The practical read-through for patient long-term investors is uncomfortable. Computershare warns that receiving statements or having dividends deposited automatically may not count as sufficient activity under some state laws. The financial system can know exactly where your money lands and still classify you as missing.
The Jan Peters case
Jan Peters, a German citizen who worked for Amazon and held 1,029 Amazon shares before the company's 20-for-1 stock split, became a concrete example of how the machinery can fail. His address had been recorded as "Munich, CA 00000." California claimed his shares, then sold the stock for approximately $1.6 million.
By June 2025, Peters calculated that the same shares would have been worth more than $4.2 million. He received the sale proceeds but not the subsequent appreciation. The gap he identifies is roughly $2.6 million. The Supreme Court declined to hear his challenge in October 2025.
The revenue motive
States argue that unclaimed-property programs create a searchable central repository rather than leaving forgotten assets with corporations indefinitely. That is the counterargument, and it carries real weight. The line to watch is what budget analysts have put in writing.
Texas officials in 2011 projected that shortening several dormancy periods would produce a one-time $72 million gain to the state's General Revenue Fund. New Jersey's Division of Taxation projected that reducing various dormancy periods to three years could push annual revenue from existing unclaimed-property categories from approximately $90 million to $309 million in a single fiscal year, with another $72 million projected from newly covered categories including securities.
Both states also made the consumer-protection argument. The financial incentive is not imaginary. Governments calculate it.
Where scrutiny is heading
The SEC has documented system failures at scale. In 2006, it accused Bank of New York of failing to search properly for approximately 14,159 lost securityholders, sending about $11.5 million of their assets to states. In 2023, the agency found that DST Asset Manager Solutions had internal screening rules that blocked potentially better addresses from reaching investors. Computershare reported 51,320 accounts remitted to states in 2024 alone.
In April, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the organization representing state unclaimed-property administrators to explain the shift from returned-mail standards to inactivity ones. Florida's 2026 reforms move the other way: the state restored returned mail as a key trigger and extended an owner-inactivity period from three years to 10 years in specified circumstances.