BTW if you take someone else’s money that’s theft as lady in a shop found out recently after she picked up a £20 left by someone. CCTV was checked and she was prosecuted for stealing
I read that too, and it’s not quite as simple as described – seems she had a pretty good idea that it had been recently dropped and didn’t make any efforts (such as asking at the counter) to see if she could find the loser.
“A person’s appropriation of property belonging to another is not to be regarded as dishonest… if he appropriates the property in the belief that the person to whom the property belongs cannot be discovered by taking reasonable steps.”
Hence; if you found a £20 on the street with no-one else around you could justifiably assess you had no chance of finding who’d lost it, and just pocket it. If you found cash in an ATM shortly after the person in front has walked away and kept it, that would be theft. And if you found £50K in used notes in a jiffy bag in the street with no-one else around, reasonable steps would be different to what you might consider reasonable steps for the lost £20 above; ie: you should hand it in to the police and if they can’t find the owner in due course you’d get it back
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39130530