Two men find 100,000 euros in Danube, might get to keep it all

For most of us, it’s just a dream – one that never happens.

We are lazing by the river, more than 100,000 euros just happen to float by, we dive in to collect it. And in the end, we get to keep it.

Turns out believe it or not, that this does actually happen sometimes. Just not to us.

Two young men in Austria, however, appear to be the lucky ones. Because that’s what happened to them Saturday.

“On Saturday morning at 10 a.m., people called the police, as there were two young men in the Danube” apparently trying to retrieve cash, said Patrick Maierhofer, a spokesman for the Vienna Police.

Source of money is a mystery

Police, knowing an emergency when they heard of one, arrived on the scene within one minute, the spokesman said.

There, Maierhofer said, they “saw two men trying to retrieve money from the water.”

So … where’d the money come from?

“There are many possibilities,” the police spokesman said. “But we think it is from a crime. In any normal case, someone wouldn’t throw 100,000 euros in a river.”

Police are checking for bank robberies in recent years, but the spokesman said this might take a bit of time.

Danube flows through 10 countries

The Danube has its source in Germany. If flows through 10 countries, coursing at its end past Moldova and through Ukraine before emptying into the Black Sea.

The young men who found the money – one is 20, the other 22, police said – will get 5% of it for having turned it over to police.

But now they have to hope for two circumstances: that the money was indeed from a crime, so no one approaches police to claim it is theirs, and that the crime goes unsolved, so police have no way of returning it to the rightful owner.

In that case, after a year the two finders – their names were not released by police – will get to keep not 5% of the money, but all of it.