So what is the cutoff for what you would keep? $170 seems ok, but would anyone keep $17,000 or $170,000? I would be so nervous not turning in $170,000, both from a legal standpoint and worried that it was drug dealer money and someone was looking for it.
I think I would turn in anything over $500. Under that amount I would wait and see if anyone was looking for something lost on the street.
A friend's two kids, who were around 10 & 12 at the time, were out playing in the woods, probably within 1/2 mile of their home, and they found a partially buried ammo box that looked like it had been unearthed by wild pigs. The kids used sticks to dig around the box. When they finally got it out of the ground and opened it they were astonished to find that it was stuffed full of stacks of $100 bills, $33K in total!
By the time the kids got the ammo box full of cash home to show their parents they had already both come up with plans for how they were going to spend the money. One of the kids wanted to buy a horse and I think the other one wanted to buy a dirt bike.
When our friend saw the "treasure" that his kids had brought home, he said he, right away, thought there was a pretty good chance it belonged to someone he knew. Our friend told his kids not to tell anybody about what they'd found and to give him some time to ask around the neighborhood to see if anyone had "lost" anything of value. He called up one of his neighbors and asked for his older brother's phone number, because he knew that the brother sometimes "hunted" in the area.
Our friend called up his neighbor's brother, whom he didn't know well at all, and asked him, "Did you, by chance, happen to bury anything in the woods near my place?"
He said, the brother answered, "Actually, I've got several things buried in the woods up there." :)
Somehow, the neighbor's brother and our friend managed to narrow it down to the ammo box, and apparently the guy was able to name the exact amount of money and describe how it was packaged.
I think the guy ended up giving the kids a couple hundred dollars as a finder's fee for returning the money. The kids were a little disappointed, but hopefully it taught them a good lesson.