17-yr-ld who wanted to buy pickup truck found $3,500 lying on the floor—his immediate reaction stunned owner
Finding a stack of cash can make anyone call it their lucky day and claim it as theirs. Yet, when seventeen-year-old Josh Pache found $3,500, he did the right thing and returned it to its rightful owner. As reported by News.com.au, on October 28, the good Samaritan’s deed earned him his deserved reward in the end.
Director of local business Coastal Demolitions, Daniel McKeller, had made a stop at a scrap metal yard and received $3,500 after dropping off some copper. He then visited The Fox's Pantry, near a petrol station in Tugun, to get a coffee, where he unknowingly dropped his cash. It was not until he returned home that he found the cash he had received from the scrap yard was missing. "I freaked out that I had lost the money because I couldn’t find it in the car," McKeller told News.com.au. He decided to phone the petrol station, where he learnt that a young man had handed the money in "without any hesitation."
McKeller went to collect the money and asked the staff to show him the CCTV footage, as he wanted to track down the young lad. He also posted the story on his Instagram account and requested people to help him find the young man. The next day, the young boy's mother reached out after seeing her 17-year-old son, Josh Pache, in the video. "He didn’t even go home and tell her (mum) about finding the money, that’s another selfless thing, that he didn’t find it a big event that he found money on the floor," McKeller explained. The young teenager, who was out with his girlfriend for lunch, had found the lost money and decided to hand it to the staff.
Josh got in contact with the man, and the pair met up. "For him to just not hesitate, take it straight to the counter, and then walk off and not even leave his name, it’s pretty remarkable. He's obviously been raised right," McKeller said. The teenager was rewarded $1,000, but Josh’s mum, Leanne, told the business owner that she would have asked him not to accept the money, but wanted to teach him that "good deeds and good karma deserve to be rewarded with good things in life." Josh, on the other hand, feels like he "couldn't live" if he took someone's hard-earned money. Interestingly, the teenager has been saving up money to buy a ute and hopes he lands an apprenticeship when he completes high school at the end of the year. As for the remaining cash, McKeller donated the money to a GoFundMe page set up for Daniel, a Gold Coast dad battling stage four of a super rare cancer, as a way of paying it forward.
Josh's reward for his good deed is proof that being honest can benefit the giver. This has been explored in a 2019 study authored by Alain Cohn and Michel André Maréchal for the Science journal. The study conducted a large-scale experiment where researchers "purposefully lost" 17,303 wallets across 40 countries. The experiment found that people were more likely to return wallets that had money than empty ones. About 40% of wallets with no money were returned, 51% of those with a small amount were returned, and 72% of those with a large amount were returned. The study highlights that people may return wallets not because of a reward, but because they don’t want to see themselves as dishonest, feel bad for the owner, or break social rules about honesty.