This may sound like an April Fool's joke that missed the deadline.
But it's not.
An investor friend of mine was lamenting the ASX's recent downturn.
His portfolio is heavily geared on the speculative side and, as such, has been particularly hard hit of late.
For me, his approach to investing is both nerve-racking and highly entertaining.
He gets a lot of "hot tips".
Sometimes they pay off, mostly they don't.
But when they do pay off, they really pay off.
And when things take a turn for the worse, he feels it most.
A few years ago, I told him to look at balancing his portfolio and mentioned that he should check out the Vanguard Australian Shares Index ETF (ASX: VAS).
Being the kind of investor he is, I was surprised when he told me he had snapped up a significant amount of Vanguard Australian shares.
So, in a bid to console my investor buddy, I asked him if he still held the Vanguard shares he bought about five years ago.
It turns out he did.
So, I reminded him that he had done well to hold them and enjoyed reasonable gains over the years.
He scoffed at me and described the returns as "paltry" before reminding me how he got in on the ground floor with Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
This is a story he loves to recount at every opportunity.
And credit where credit is due.
"Well, it's not so paltry, particularly when you count the dividends," I reminded him.
"Dividends?" He replied.
It turned out he hadn't factored in the dividends he had been collecting over the years.
Or rather, the dividends he should have been collecting over the years.
We checked his CommSec account, and it turned out he had never received any of his Vanguard dividends.
We tried to get to the bottom of the issue and contacted CommSec.
It turned out he hadn't nominated whether he wanted to reinvest his dividends or take the cash.
In fact, my investor friend was not familiar with the potential benefits offered by a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRP). But that's another story for another time.
After contacting the share registry for the Vanguard Australian Shares Index, which in this case was Computershare Ltd (ASX: CPU), we started to investigate the problem.
My investor buddy had neglected to provide the registry with up-to-date details.
In fact, it seems he didn't provide them with any details. Ever.
The registry instructed him to provide his details, asked him to fill out a few forms, and said he would receive his dividends.
And so my investor buddy was significantly better off.
I must say I found the whole process highly amusing.
But in the end, it was my investor friend who was really laughing.
Then it got me thinking.
Image source: Getty Images
Billion-dollar black hole?
I wondered how common this issue was.
I got in touch with someone who once worked at a registry and was more familiar with these things and was told that I would be "surprised by how often this sort of thing happens".
Had I just uncovered a billion-dollar black hole?
According to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, "there's around $2.3 billion of lost money to be claimed from bank accounts, shares, investments and life insurance policies".
The Australian Shareholders Association stated that it is "very common for shareholders to lose touch with the companies they invest in".
"More than 150,000 small investors have forgotten about $451 million worth of shares. Australia has $1.1 billion dollars of unclaimed money."
It turns out my friend is not alone.
And although I wasn't the first to uncover the potential millions of dollars in lost dividends, I knew, at the very least, I had my next Motley Fool story.
And I helped someone get a bit richer.
Perhaps more than one person. Have you checked your dividends lately?
