A homeless man in Boston made headlines this week for returning a bag he found that had over $40,000 worth of cash and travelers checks in it, and now he’s getting rewarded.
Glen James found the backpack with $2,400 worth of cash and almost $40,000 in travelers checks on Saturday at the South Bay Mall and he took it directly to the police.
"Even if I were desperate for money, I would not have kept even a...penny of the money I found,” he said at the time.
ABC News reports that his community rallied to make sure he was rewarded for being a good Samaritan and started a campaign that would give him some money in his pocket for his good deed.
One of the organizers of the fundraiser, Ethan Whittington, said he read that James was presented with a plaque for his act of honesty and thought it wasn’t enough.
“When I saw an update on the article that mentioned the [student] received his bag back and didn’t mention anything about what James got besides a plaque, I thought, ‘Is a plaque really gonna benefit a guy like that?’” he said.
The fundraiser has now raised $72,287 and Whittington explained, “I heard about GoFundMe, Tweeted it out to my five followers on Twitter. It says a lot about Boston, the way everyone responded to that thing.”