A car repair job unexpectedly turned into a reunion for a man and the wallet he’d lost 10 years ago.
The Associated Press reports that Richard Guilford, of Michigan, had misplaced his wallet in 2014 while working on cars in a Ford factory. Thinking that it might’ve fallen onto the floor of a vehicle he’d worked on, he and his coworkers looked through dozens of cars “just opening the doors up, looking under the seats, looking behind it,” but the wallet remained missing.
What Guilford didn’t know was that his wallet had actually fallen into the engine of a Ford Edge. That wouldn’t be discovered until June 2025, when the owner of the car, which had 151,000 miles on it, took it into a Minnesota repair shop. That’s when mechanic Chad Volk discovered it as he was trying to snap the air filter box back into place.
“I messed around a little bit and then pulled [the air filter box] back out and the wallet was sitting on a little ledge where it needed to snap down,” Volk says. “I pulled the wallet out and that’s what it was.”
One Facebook message later and Guilford finally had his missing wallet back.
“The amazing part to me was [the wallet] was so protected,” Guilford says. “Think about this: 11 years, rain, snow. It was in Minnesota, for crying out loud. It was in Arizona when it was bought. Think about how hot a transmission gets in Arizona driving down the road. That’s incredible.”