What's worth 400-million dollars, is owned by one in ten Missourians, and sits in a state account?
Unclaimed Property.
Cash from bank accounts, stocks, bonds, utility deposits that the owners or heirs either lost track of, or don't even know exits.
Last November KSPR did a special on Missouri's Unclaimed Property Division.
The state search team came to the Battlefield Mall and for one afternoon, checked people's names against their database.
They found more than $100,000 that afternoon. That’s more than the state finds in a week at the Missouri State Fair.
It was so popular, KSPR decided to help the state find some people in the Ozarks, so we could reunite them with their money.
This is the beginning of a five part series, by showing you how we found them.

From these files in Jefferson City, the Missouri State Treasurer sent KSPR News a sampling of unclaimed property owners in counties around Springfield.
We gave the list to a private investigator at Midwest Intelligence.
It's run by former Christian county Sheriff Dwight McNiel who says we all leave a paper trail.
"...hooking up utilities, using credit cards, changing addresses, changing our social security or employment records," McNiel said
When investigators like McNiel look for someone, they call it skip tracing.
Really it's Marcella McNiel and their chief investigator who do all the work.
"All skip tracing efforts begin with bulk data mining. We then blend that with bulk data that we purchase from information brokers from around the world," he said.
To show us the amount of information out there, they surprised reporter Joe Daues with a pretty thick file of information about my past.
"The assessor records, voter registration records," McNiel said.
Once investigators have all this data,. the real work begins to match information with whereabouts.
Apparently our list from the state ... wasn't much of a challenge.
"Most of them were pretty routine... pretty easy to do," said McNiel.
So with names and addresses in hand, we went knocking on doors: from Ozark, to Rogersville, Springfield and Billings.
We'll tell you what happened at each home, during our 5:30 newscast each night this week.