Legal Question in Criminal Law in Canada

Re: Lost and found lottery tickets

It is pretty clear that a person can be guilty of theft when he or she finds lost property and does not attempt to find the owner. The proper thing to do would be to deliver the property to the police or, as you were about to do, to your company's lost and found department.

The reason theft may occur in these circumstances is that lost property is, as circumstances may suggest, still owned property and a theft will occur when someone takes property, without colour of right, with the intention of depriving the owner of that property whether temporarily or permanently.

In these circumstances, since you did not know who the owner was, and were going to deliver it to your company, this does not suggest an intention to steal. Consider too that the market value of these tickets at the time would have been less than their purchase price. Someone might speculate that you intended to claim a ticket as your own if it turn out to be a winner, but that would be speculation unless you admitted that was your plan. That you returned the items to the owner immediately after determining who the owner was, suggests no such plan and no such intention to steal. If you technically violated a company policy that you may or may not have known about at the time, that by itself cannot make you guilty of theft.

Therefore, if the police had charged you, it would have been a pretty lame decision. As for the customer, she was rude to accuse you of a crime rather than thank you for your honesty.