Americans need to protect their belongings as the most dangerous time of year for losing things approaches. According to the research commissioned by Mozy, more items are lost at 6:00 p.m. on Saturdays in December than at any other time of the year. The transition from work to weekend, and Saturday afternoon Christmas shopping to Saturday night parties, appears to create the perfect storm for losing things. More items go missing on Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays than the rest of the week put together. And people travelling through Chicago, New York and Atlanta should be extra cautious since these three cities form the Bermuda Triangle for lost property – with more items reported lost or stolen there than in any other city. According to the study:
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39.5% of Americans lose two or more belongings a year, and globally less than half of lost items are ever recovered. With the average person in the U.S. misplacing nearly $250 worth of possessions in the past 12 months, this amounts to well over $39 billion of lost property in the U.S. this year.
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The most commonly lost item is a smartphone – which accounts for 40% of all items lost by men and 33% by women in the United States.
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70% of people globally have lost electronic gadgets, such as smartphones, laptops and portable media players.
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55% of lost items found their way home courtesy of a kind stranger, compared to just 12% of items that were rediscovered by their owners.
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While 61% of people have found an item that wasn’t theirs and 52% successfully returned them, 16% kept the item for themselves while and 6% sold it.
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Germans are least likely to lose belongings – with 64% of Germans saying they haven’t lost anything in the last 12 months (the global average is 51%).
