12 Times People Received Money Practically Out of Nowhere

A random guy with a horse, an older woman at a café, a dog—who knew these everyday encounters could deliver life-changing luck? These 12 unbelievable stories will have you believing that the universe has its way of rewarding us.

• A stranger once paid me $200 to meow for him. He recorded it, but audio only. I just meowed a few times, he recorded it using his phone (not even a clean recording, lots of background noise as we were in a hotel lobby), gave me $200 in cash, and that was it. © Particular-Natural12 / Reddit

• I bought a waterproof camera back in 2010 and thought it would be cool to try it out at the new water park that just opened. 1 year later, the video blew up, making me tons of money monthly. I still make some during the summer months, but not much. Now I'm sitting at just over 100,000,000 views.
  Edit: since it's buried in the comments now, here's the video. © t073 / Reddit

• I worked at a local restaurant job as a line cook for about one month, and we were paid biweekly. After a month, the general manager laid me, and one other guy off because they weren't making enough money to pay us, and we were the newest people on the totem pole. I'm 100% positive I received two paychecks.
  For whatever reason, about two years later, I received a letter from the headquarters of the company for a potential check of 1,000 dollars, and they apologized for not paying me. Again, I swear I got all of my money, but since I have a common first and last name, I think they got me confused with someone.
  Being the honest person I am, I called the headquarters and gave my Social Security Number, but they insisted I was the right person. I have no idea how it happened (I still think the entire thing was an error), but I received an approximate $1,000 paycheck. © MTVChallengeFan / Reddit

• In the 90s, I fostered a dog for some friends who were leaving town and left the dog with me. This dog immediately made an impression on me, and even though I really didn't want a pet at the time, he was such an amazing dog, he convinced me otherwise. He was super smart, half black lab, half pit bull. I called him "wisdom" because he was so smart.
  Fast-forward a few years, I used him as a mascot for a recording studio I set up. I registered the domain name wisdom.com. My dog passed away several years later, and I was heartbroken and depressed for many years. I maintained the domain name even though I didn't really have any projects associated with it. Over the years, people made offers on the domain name, but I always passed. The domain was a homage to my long-lost best friend.
  Then in 2000, with the dot-com boom, there was renewed interest in domains and IPOs. I had a few groups bugging me for the domain name and kept increasing their offers. Eventually, the numbers got into the "life-changing" areas of money, and I couldn't ignore them.
  I originally secured the wisdom.com domain name for nothing. In the early days of the Internet, it didn't cost any money to register a domain name. You just had to fill out the right forms. I actually would never have to pay any domain renewal fees if it wasn't for a sysadmin that made changes to the domain and accepted new terms of service that forced me to have to pay renewal fees.
  Otherwise, the $475,000 I was ultimately offered in cash would have been pure profit. But instead, my cost was a few hundred dollars over the year. Still, a significant windfall that gave me the opportunity to take that money and create another cool community of wonderful people. © MysticKrewe / Reddit

• When I was 17 my mom told me to open a bank account because I was going to get around 500–600 from my dad. Opened the bank account, signed the papers she needed me to, and got a whopping $15,400 deposited into my bank at 18 years old.
  2 years ago came to find out he got a huge settlement for a car accident (I think?) and got another 15k disbursed over 2.5 years. IDK if it was back child support or what, but I was really blessed. © Gaiaaura / Reddit

• My friend's father was gifted an oil pencil drawing in the late 70s. His family always assumed it was pretty much worthless, and I always joked that it looked like my friend had drawn it as a child.
  This stilly angry stick figure drawing ended up being an unsigned piece of art by Jean-Michel Basquiat. His family did some digging and eventually had it authenticated by the JMB estate before selling it at Christie's auction house for an amazing sum of money.
  I was absolutely blown away when I learned this. My friend and his family were far from wealthy, so to realize they had this unknown treasure just sitting out in the living room for so many years was mind-blowing. © Zuliman / Reddit

• I had a coworker who had bought a new car, and within a week somebody crashed into him and the car was totaled. He ended up getting a little more from their insurance than he'd paid for the car, and moved on.
  A year later, he got a letter from the other guy's insurance company saying that they had audited their books and found that they owed him money. They sent him a check for $16,000 to pay for the damage to the car they had already totaled. © DimitriV / Reddit

• I cut my elder neighbor's yard growing up and helped him with random things around the house. He passed away while I was in college.
  Came home one weekend and I had a letter in the mail. It was from my old neighbor's attorney advising me he left me his house, money, and 2 cars. I was fairly close with the guy, but I never knew he had no family at all. Immediately sold the cars, rented the house out, and invested 50% of the money. © Rotoscope8 / Reddit

• I was having dinner with my parents at a café, and they started talking about me taking a civil service test cuz I was unemployed. I got frustrated and walked away from the table and accidentally bumped into an older lady, and she dropped her purse and stuff spilled out. She was pissed and I felt bad.
  I started helping her pick up her stuff and she grabbed my hand and said that I had amazing hands and asked if I ever did any hand modeling. She gave me her card, and a few days later I was modeling a watch for a catalog and making bank. © B******man64wasdecent / Reddit

• I had an aunt who was basically excommunicated from my family for reasons that still are unclear to me. I was super young when the falling out happened.
  She was married to some super old guy who was oil wealthy, and inherited his fortune when he passed. When I was 23, she passed, and crazily enough, I was her favorite. She liked me, and in her letter left to me, I was the son she never had (I remember the way she used to play hide-and-seek with me but nothing else).
  She left me 2.4 million dollars. I’ve always in the back of my mind tried to make her proud of me, 'cause she was the cool hide-and-seek aunt I never really knew. © Unknown author / Reddit

• I once found an unclaimed lottery ticket on the ground at a gas station. I was like, screw it, let's see if it's a winner, 'cause I had just gotten off work and was headed home. It ended up being $250, which was amazing at the time as a 16-year-old.
  A few months later, I found another scratch-off that won $50 at the same gas station, lol. Not a lot of money, but when you're a kid working minimum wage part-time in high school, it's practically an entire paycheck. © ZanXBal / Reddit

• My grandfather was a big animal vet out in the country. He was driving home one night when he noticed a guy on the side of the road trying to calm a horse, and not doing well. My grandfather stopped and helped the man and found the horse was having a medical issue that he helped fix. After everything was done, my grandfather put the horse in a trailer he luckily had connected to the truck and gave the man (Joe) a ride home. Joe wanted to pay, but my grandfather refused, so Joe took the money he was going to pay and invested it. My grandfather kinda passively agreed and moved on.
  15 years later, a young man came by my grandfather's home. He was Joe's son and had come by to let my grandfather know Joe had passed, and he was closing all his father's accounts. Joe had invested $200 for 15 years and turned it into 1.2 million...in the 1960s.
  He paid off all his bills, expanded his farm, sent all of his children to college, and 10 years later fulfilled his dream of moving to Alaska and retired. He also gave the 5 oldest grandchildren (including me) 5k for our 21st birthdays. © MinerOfStarDust / Reddit

Yeah, luck can strike when you least expect it. But as they say, forewarned is forearmed. Have you ever heard of the "Coffee Cup Test"? Some hiring managers use this seemingly innocent gesture as a secret test to evaluate your character. If you want to get the position you've been waiting for too long, check it out!