When you lose a wallet, phone or other item of value, it always seems down to complete chance whether you’ll get it back or not. But do your chances of having the ‘lost property’ returned improve or suffer significantly depending on where you lost it?

Reader’s Digest decided to address that question through a casual, small-scale experiment. They purposefully dropped 12 wallets in 16 different international cities, at locations where they would definitely be found. The wallets contained $50 in the local currency, as well as business cards, family photos and - most importantly - a mobile phone number and contact details. They then simply waited to see if the wallets were returned. Check out the results on the map below:

Helsinki topped the ‘honesty’ list, with 11 out of 12 wallets returned to the reporters. Mumbai came in second place with only three wallets remaining missing, while 50% or more of the wallets were returned in half the cities. 47% of wallets were returned altogether.

Spain and Portugal came out worst: only two wallets were returned in Madrid, while only a single one made it back to its owners in Lisbon. In that case, it was a visiting Dutch couple who returned the wallet.

Of course, there were a couple of interesting aberrations: like the woman in Rio who returned the wallet without any money. Did she pocket the money or did someone else stumble across it before she did? In Zurich, a tram driver was spotted pocketing the wallet for himself rather than returning it to the lost & found office run by the city's transit organisation.

It’s not exactly the most scientifically robust of experiments, and there are some famously ‘honest’ locations missing (where’s Japan?). A larger scale version of the experiment would likely prove very expensive indeed. Still, it’s an interesting test with some surprising results, despite the pretty predictable final conclusion of "there are honest and dishonest people everywhere". We’re already wondering where Dublin would figure in the rankings...