Building Found Here: Returning Lost Things Without Trusting Strangers

Someone finds a wallet on a train platform. They want to return it. That should be the easy part — and it is where the whole thing falls apart. They can post it online, and now everyone who sees the post knows a wallet was found, roughly where, and roughly when. That is enough for a stranger to describe it convincingly and collect it. The finder has no way to tell the difference. Most people, sensibly, hand the wallet to a desk somewhere and hope for the best.

We built Found Here at FJ Software Studio to close that gap. It is a lost-and-found platform for cities: report what you lost, report what you found, and let the platform work out whether the two match — without either person having to take the other on faith. It is live at foundhere.app.

The awkward problem: proving something is yours

Every lost-and-found system runs into the same wall. Describing an item publicly is what makes it findable, and it is also what makes it claimable by anyone.

Found Here resolves this by inverting who answers the questions. When you report something you found, you can attach verification questions only the real owner could answer — what was in the side pocket, what the lock screen shows, which corner is scratched. The public listing stays vague on purpose. The specifics live in the questions.

Claimants get a limited number of attempts, set by the person who found the item. That limit matters more than it sounds: without it, a determined guesser eventually gets through, and "answer the security question" becomes theatre. With it, a wrong claim costs something.

The result is that the finder never has to judge whether someone seems honest. They just look at whether the answers are right.

Being findable without being exposed

The second tension is that a lost-item report is, by nature, a description of your belongings, your movements, and your contact details. Publishing all of that to strangers is a poor trade for the chance of getting a scarf back.

So identity is something you dial. You choose how your name appears to other people — in full, as a first name with an initial, or as initials only — and that choice follows you everywhere the platform shows your name, including to organizations that can see your item but do not own it. Items themselves have their own setting: fully public, restricted to authorities, or private.

None of this is a banner or a consent dialog. It is a set of defaults that a person who never opens their settings still benefits from.

Nearby, not everywhere

A lost item is a local event. Something dropped in one neighbourhood is almost never found three cities away, so blasting a notification to every user is both useless and the fastest way to get an app muted.

Found Here treats proximity as the routing rule. An item is reported against the places it might have been lost — often several, because people retrace a route rather than recall a spot — and the platform works out who is actually near enough to help, including people who are regularly in that area rather than only those standing in it at that moment.

We put deliberate limits on how often that can be used. There are cooldowns per item and per recipient, and monthly caps by account type. A lost-and-found platform lives or dies on people leaving notifications switched on, and every unnecessary alert spends credibility we cannot buy back.

Where organizations fit

A great deal of lost property never passes between two individuals. It ends up behind a counter at a hotel, a stadium, a transit operator, a shopping centre. Those organizations have the items; the people looking for them are somewhere else entirely.

Found Here gives organizations a proper dashboard — their own inventory, staff assignment, internal notes, claims to review — and defines a coverage area so that community reports near their sites surface alongside their own records.

That last part took us longer to get right than it should have. Seeing an item and being able to act on it are different rights, and we had originally conflated them: an item that fell inside an organization's coverage area was treated as an item that organization could edit. Two organizations with overlapping areas could each modify the other's records. Coverage tells you what is nearby; ownership decides what you may change. Separating those two ideas cleanly was one of the more involved pieces of work on the platform, and none of it is visible in the interface — which is roughly the definition of getting authorization right.

Seventeen languages, including the ones that read right to left

Lost property is not a market you can serve in English. Found Here ships in seventeen languages, and the right-to-left ones are not an afterthought: the layout mirrors rather than the text simply being swapped in place.

We hold the line with a check that fails the build when a translation key exists in one language and not another. It is an unglamorous piece of tooling that has repeatedly stopped a raw organization.nav.subscription from reaching somebody's screen.

What we learned

The interesting problems in Found Here were never the map or the search. They were the social ones. How do you let someone prove an item is theirs to a person who has no reason to believe them? How do you make an item findable without making its owner exposed? How much may you interrupt someone before helping stops being welcome?

Each of those has a technical answer, but the answer is only correct if you have understood the human situation first. Getting them wrong does not produce an error message — it produces a platform people quietly stop trusting.

Found Here is live at foundhere.app, and it is one of a growing set of products we build for ourselves at FJ Software Studio: the same standard we hold our client work to, pointed at problems we think are worth solving.