A hypothetical situation such as the following has been covered on The Brady Bunch, more or less:
Pretend you are walking down the street and find a credit card lying on the ground. As you pick it up you discover that it is signed with a basic script on the back that would be easy to forge, with an expiration day far in the future. No one is around. No one is looking for the card, and no one has seen you pick it up. What do you do?
I found such a card a few days ago. It was simply lying on the ground. I picked it up, looked at it, realized what it was, looked around, then wondered what to do. Since I had touched it, I thought about wiping my fingerprints off it, putting it back where I found it, and simply walking away. Then I thought that if someone more dishonest than I found this card, they might hurt the person that lost it.
The card owner was Korean. I didn’t know who it was, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with them. I had no idea who to call, or where to go to get this sort of thing settled. I supposed I would need to call the bank or service that issued the card, but I didn’t know what sort of questions they would ask. If I showed up at a police station to explain where I got the card, there might be a very good chance they wouldn’t understand me and a larger problem would arise.
Briefly I thought about the situation. A foreigner walks in with a credit card clearly with a Korean name on it. I turn it over to the police, and they run some sort of program to check what was purchased recently. The card had been in the hands of criminals before it came into my possession, so now all the fake purchases are attributed to me. Having no way to explain myself, I’m locked up and sent off to who knows where. Unlikely? Perhaps, but why take a risk.
To be honest, there was a fleeting second where I considered holding onto the card, using it to go on a wild spending spree at an electronics mall, living like a techno-obessed geek king. I would take up cigar smoking and walk around without a shirt on so that people could admire my copious amounts of chest hair while I talked condescendingly to the locals. There would be wild car chases, and perhaps a comedic sidekick that would join me before my inevitable shootout with the cops while on some remote tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It would be a good life, short and sweet, with the option to be made into a film by Jerry Bruckheimer. This was all in a very brief second of doubt, before I pondered all the negative aspects of having my own credit card stolen.
Next, I thought about destroying the card. I didn’t have any scissors with me, and snapping the card in two wasn’t something I had been able to do with expired cards of my own in the past. This probably would have been the best option, but I decided I would hold onto it instead. I was actually headed to relatives house at the time, so I kept the card with me and simply handed it over to them. I explained where I found it and told them I don’t know who it is. Let them sort it all out. I don’t think they will do anything to abuse the card, and I trust them to either find the owner, inform the proper authorities, destroy the card, or figure out what to do.
Seems to me, when given a moral choice, I trusted someone with more chance of doing right to make the decisions for me, but didn’t trust the average person on the street to do the right thing. Perhaps this says something about my character as a person. Entrusted with power, I’m likely to go ask someone else to fix a problem too big for me if I think the consequences of failure are too severe. I haven’t lost sleep over my choice.
