You’d think that finding more than £10,000 in cash, in a bag next to a cash machine, and returning it to its rightful owners would be applauded. But for one man, all that it resulted in was a £300 fine.

Robert Adams, 54, saw the bag full of money next to a cash machine with Chase Bank’s logo on the side. Instead of taking advantage, the resident of Arlington Heights, Illinois, returned it to the bank in question.

But he made a mistake, by giving police false information about exactly where he found it.

Adams found the large sum of cash on the night of 6 June while using an ATM inside the shop Walgreens. He had planned to meet a woman for a date, but when she failed to show decided to buy a drink before heading home.

Instead of handing in the money in the area where he found it, Adams took it to a police station nearer to his home where he said he felt more comfortable speaking to local police in familiar surroundings.

“I didn’t want to go back into Walgreens, so I thought I would drive to the Chase Bank near my house and return it,” he told the Southtown Star in the US.

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On a daily basis, one of my first order of things to do is check my emails as well as visit my social media pages to get caught up with as much news as possible; and of course drop a few inspirational words of wisdom. I was catching up on Facebook when I noticed a media colleague of mine Wana Udobang, a British-Nigerian journalist and radio personality, update her status online.

I responded with a comment on how long it had been since I read her writings and that she had been missing in action for a while. She responded saying she had in fact been writing and provided a link to a recent article she authored only four days ago. The article addressed the discriminatory treatment of single women in Nigeria narrating her own personal experience.

What was striking to me was that her story discussed how she was denied access to eat at a hotel restaurant in Abuja, Nigeria, based solely on her gender. The incident took place a few months ago this year, 2011. The rationale behind the denial was that the hotel was trying to allegedly deal with the issue of prostitution in Abuja. Accordingly, it had a mandated internal policy that women must be accompanied by men to be served at its restaurant. The article was silent on the name of the restaurant. I was at once intrigued and amused. I thought to myself this had to be an archaic restaurant of some sorts. Nevertheless, I shared the link on my facebook wall page.

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