Verification codes aren’t just for computers.
A Samaritan who found a lost wallet is going viral after devising a fool-proof formula to prevent the money pouch from falling into the wrong hands.
“I left a note in a way so only the real owner could contact me,” declared the person in a viral Reddit post alongside a pic of their “Da Vinci Code”-evoking encryption.
They had reportedly found the missing “black wallet” on Saturday, per the screenshot. Then, like any good samaritan, they took the money pouch and left a handwritten message with a way to get in touch.
But instead of just writing out their phone number where bad actors could intercept it, they camouflaged it in a verification “equation” that only the wallet’s rightful owner could solve.
Per the screenshotted note, the person was required to input their birthday — which the recoverer presumably obtained off their driver’s license — in the “DD/MM/YYYY” format.
When they added this number to “030532468,” this would give them the samaritan’s phone number, whereupon the wallet’s owner could call them and retrieve their lost card holder.
However, they’d only have through the weekend to collect it from the finder.
The Redditor noted in the letter that they’d be delivering the missing money pouch to the police station on Monday.
Reddit users were impressed with this brick-and-mortar security password.
“That’s… actually kind of genius,” gushed one fan, while another dubbed the algorithm “as smart as it is wholesome.”
“That was f–king incredible, how did he even come up with this???” fawned a third. “Cause it’s literally only going to be solvable by one person.”
They added, “It’s so highly unlikely for someone to have the same exact birthday and be in the same exact area that just lost a black wallet. This should be so much more common.”
The original poster replied that they’d gotten the idea from a YouTube video on cryptography — the practice of decoding and encoding info so only authorized parties can access it.
