We’ve often mused about what we’d do if we were to stumble on a whole lot of cash, seemingly without any owner to claim it. Maybe sneak a few bills? Quietly tuck it all away and pretend like it never happened? We couldn’t, we just couldn’t. And when a bus driver in Vienna found a shopping bag filled with 390,000 euros ($509,700) in cash, he did the right thing, too.

Reuters says the man was going through his bus at the end of his shift, a routine procedure for all bus drivers, when he found the shopping bag in the seat behind where he sits.

“At first I thought it was shopping or medicine,” the Krone newspaper quoted him as saying. It wasn’t, it was a bunch of 500-euro notes. He called the police, who tracked an elderly woman down through a bank deposit slip that was in the bag.

She got her money back, but so far there’s no word on whether he got a reward. We hope police advised her not to carry around such a fortune in a shopping bag. Or leave it on buses, for that matter. Not everyone could turn down a free fortune, after all.

Austrian bus driver returns half a million dollars found in bag [Reuters]

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