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Korean family’s VCR with $6,000 inside recovered from recycling center

July 7, 2014

 

(Seattle's KOMO4 TV screen capture)

(Seattle’s KOMO4 screen capture)

SEATTLE — Everyone’s got a secret cash stash, but be careful — a family member just might unknowingly throw it away to a recycling center.

It’s what happened to Tony Hwang’s mother, who hid an emergency stash of $6,000 in an old, unused VCR.

Hwang told KOMO News that he took the VCR to a recycling event on June 28, not knowing about its contents. It wasn’t until his mother came home from work that he knew there was something wrong.

“She was just looking for the VCR. She was really sad, so that’s when we knew it was something more than just a VCR,” Hwang told KOMO.

Hwang’s mother and his sister went to 1 Green Planet, a recycling warehouse, to sift through 12 tons of old recyclables that had been donated at the event.

It took a few hours for the warehouse staff, who had no idea about the money but who were told by Hwang’s mother that the VCR was important to her, to find the black box at the bottom of the sixth container.

“Please keep it in a bank, not in a VCR,” KOMO reported the warehouse owner telling Hwang and his mother Thursday as he handed it over.