I ran this on my own email expecting a stray twenty dollar gift card, and it came back with 800 dollars of American Airlines credit that doesn't expire until 2028. I had no memory of it. If I had never gone looking I would have let the whole thing quietly disappear.
The plan · 3 steps
It also turned up a handful of restaurant gift cards I'd been given and forgotten about, which is somehow worse, because those were presents from people who spent real money on them.
Why This Works So Well
43% of Americans are holding at least one gift card, voucher or store credit they've never used, and the average person in that group is sitting on 244 dollars of it. Across the country there's north of 20 billion dollars in gift cards nobody ever spent.
Every company that hands you a credit is quietly hoping you forget about it. When an airline gives you a flight credit instead of your money back, they keep your cash and they know a slice of those credits will never get used. None of it is a scam, it's just how the maths works. They're counting on the fact that a credit is a boring email you got eighteen months ago, buried under four thousand others.
That's exactly the problem AI is good at. Your inbox already has every receipt, every confirmation, every apology email with a code in it. You were never going to read back through nine years of email by hand. Something else can do it in two minutes.
Connect Your Inbox
Nothing works until the AI can read your email. This is the only setup step and you only do it once.
If you use Claude (recommended, works on the free plan):
If you use ChatGPT:
ChatGPT calls these Plugins now. Click Plugins in the left sidebar, or Settings then Plugins, or go to chatgpt.com/plugins. Search Gmail, click Connect, sign in to Google, approve.
Heads up: Connecting Gmail in ChatGPT generally needs a paid plan. Claude's Gmail connector works on the free plan, so that's the route I'd point you to rather than paying twenty dollars to go looking for your own money.
What it can and can't do: it reads. That's it. It cannot send an email as you, delete anything, or change a single thing in your inbox. Claude can write a draft if you ask, and that draft just sits in your drafts folder waiting for you to press send.
To cut it off: Claude, go to Customize then Connectors then Disconnect. ChatGPT, go to Plugins and disconnect. Or from Google's side at myaccount.google.com/connections, which works no matter what the app says.
Tip: If your old receipts live in a different account from the one you use every day, connect that one instead. Most people's forgotten money is in whichever address they were using five years ago.
The Main Prompt
This is the whole guide in one paste. Open a new chat, paste it in, and let it run. It takes a couple of minutes because it's genuinely reading back through years of your email, so don't close the tab the second it looks like nothing is happening.
The Validation Prompt
A list of credits from your email is not the same thing as money. Some codes are already spent, some quietly expired, and some were never worth what the email said.
This one needs a browser. With Claude, that means the Claude Chrome extension connected. With ChatGPT, use the desktop app, switch to Work, and type @browser in your message.
You'll have to help it here, and that's normal. It'll get to an airline site, hit a login screen, and stop. Log in yourself, then tell it to carry on. It will not ask for your passwords and you should never type one into the chat.
The middle list is the one that saves you a wasted afternoon. Knowing a credit is dead is worth almost as much as knowing one is alive. The third list is your own to-do list of two or three phone calls worth making.
Tip: If a site blocks it, don't fight it. Ask "give me the direct link to the balance-check page for this company and the exact code to paste in" and do that one yourself.
Four More Prompts Worth Running
Run these in the same chat so it still remembers everything it found.
1. Get it into a table you can read
2. Actually use it
3. Stop the leak
4. Chase the refund that never actually landed
A company says "your refund has been processed and will appear in five to seven business days," and then sometimes it just doesn't, and nobody is ever going to chase it except you.
Tip: When it finds one, ask it to write the follow-up: "draft a short, polite email to this company asking where this refund went, and quote the original email and date." Read it, then send it yourself. Companies pay out surprisingly fast when you can name a date and an amount.
Bonus, because it's the same idea
These land in your inbox looking exactly like junk, get ignored, and often carry a real payout with a hard deadline attached.
Six Other Places The Money Hides
Your inbox is the biggest single pile, but it isn't the only one. Check these by hand.
Airline accounts. Log in to each airline you've flown and look for a credits, vouchers or wallet section. Airlines are notorious for holding a credit in your account without ever emailing you about it again.
Hotel and travel loyalty. Point balances, and whether they expire from inactivity.
Store accounts. Store credit from returns sitting on the account rather than on a card.
PayPal and Venmo. Money someone sent you that you never moved to your bank.
Physical cards in a drawer. Anything that never touched your email will never show up in this search.
Unclaimed property. The one almost nobody knows about. Every US state holds money that belongs to you: old deposits, final paychecks, forgotten accounts. Search your name for free at missingmoney.com and on your state's own programme.
Heads up: Never pay anyone to find this for you. Searching and claiming through official state programmes is always free. Anyone offering to recover your unclaimed money for a percentage is a finder making money out of a search you can do yourself in five minutes.
The Two Rules
It only sees what's in your email. Anything that lived only in an app, or on a physical card in a drawer, will never show up. Check those separately.
Verify before you count it. Codes get spent, expire, or come with terms that changed. It isn't money until you've seen a live balance on the company's own site.
Most people find something between fifty and a few hundred dollars, and a decent number find nothing at all, which is a perfectly fine outcome and means your record keeping is better than mine. It costs you twenty minutes once and the downside is zero.
Your Action Plan
It's not found money. It was always yours. You just forgot where you put it.