IT LEFT WHEN YOU WEREN'T LOOKING
U.S. Treasury Department · Financial Services
Challenge
Behaviour change — Working-class and middle-income Americans aged 25-55 who have moved across state lines at least once, particularly renters and gig economy workers who are disproportionately likely to have unclaimed financial assets — people who distrust government outreach because they associate unsolicited contact about money with scams.
Insight
Americans have tens of billions in unclaimed assets sitting in state treasuries — old paychecks, forgotten deposits, insurance payouts — but the very population most likely to have unclaimed money is the least likely to search for it, because years of phishing scams and predatory 'you've won' schemes have trained lower-income Americans to treat any message saying 'the government owes you money' as an automatic fraud signal.
Idea
Instead of telling people they're owed money — the exact language scammers use — the campaign flipped the frame entirely: it showed people the money quietly leaving their lives, dramatizing the 'quiet drain' of assets they never knew they'd lost, and built an AI-powered search tool that let people verify claims through trusted community touchpoints rather than cold government outreach.
Execution
The hero film depicted a series of intimate, mundane life transitions — a woman packing boxes after a breakup, a man starting a new job in a new city, a family downsizing after a layoff — and with each scene, a small translucent stream of money visually drifted out of their pockets, wallets, and mailboxes, pooling unseen in a vast government vault. The tagline 'It left when you weren't looking' reframed unclaimed money not as a windfall but as something stolen by life's chaos. The AI-powered search tool was embedded in trusted community platforms — public library kiosks, credit union apps, tax prep services like VITA — so people encountered it in environments where they already trusted the institution, sidestepping the scam reflex entirely. Short-form social content featured real people reacting to discovering their own unclaimed assets in real time, filmed documentary-style with no scripting.