How Shares Get Lost

Shareholdings can get lost, mislaid or overlooked in many ways.

People move and don’t provide a forwarding address.

Companies change names or get taken over. Although the company will always notify its shareholders of such changes, if they don’t have the shareholder’s current address, the shareholder could be registered as “address unknown”.

There can be allocations of new shares due to reorganisation.

Also, people do just forget. This is particularly true for small quantities of shares, which may be easily forgotten about or overlooked because they appear to have little value. However, over time such shareholdings may increase in value significantly.

Often, shares that may be held or registered abroad can be difficult to recover. J & L Research has significant experience in the reclaiming of such shares, particularly those held in either the US or Asian markets.

When a shareholder stops receiving communications from a company, the holding can easily be forgotten. Additionally, if ever needed. there will not be any paper trail for the shareholder or others to follow. A frequent occurrence is that deceased person's family may not even know of the existence of a particular shareholding and that holding, which is due to the beneficiaries, remains unclaimed often for decades.