Site's traffic soars after Sink TV shot

Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink's brief turn on a Dateline NBC segment Monday was successful beyond the agency's expectations. She appeared as part of a story called "You Might Be Rich!" on efforts to return millions of dollars worth of unclaimed property to its rightful owners, including a stray Purple Heart that belongs to a Vietnam veteran living in Ocala.

The segment ran Monday night. By Tuesday, Sink's state Bureau of Unclaimed Property web site, with a searchable database of unclaimed items, was getting so much traffic (45,781 unique visitors in a day) that it crashed for an hour, CFO spokesman Kevin Cate said. The site is back up, with a note that attributes heavy traffic to the Dateline NBC segment. Is the heavy traffic the result of TV exposure? Or perhaps another reflection of how hard-pressed people are these days?

Sink's office coordinated interviews with Florida's NBC affiliates to draw attention to billions of dollars in cash, stocks, bonds, jewelry and other property sitting unclaimed in bank safety deposit boxes. The CFO's memo to network affiliates in Florida included video of a state vault filled with unclaimed items at an undisclosed Tallahassee location.

Following an exhaustive search for property owners, the state will auction more than 500,000 unclaimed items at a major auction Aug. 2 at Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay. Since 1961, Florida has received $2.7-billion in unclaimed property.

Comments

Cause she's a classy babe!

This is the same stupid show Tom Gallagher was on two years ago. Zzzzz.

She is neither

The reply to both questions asked by Steven Bousquet is YES.

Sink is an idiot who has not done hardly anything since elected.

What a joke.

Sink is not an idiot. She is a bright woman who is new to politics.

ok, 10:23pm

Sink is a newly elected idiot that hasn't done hardly anything since being elected in 2006.

[miamifl]

Sink is bright? How about the Local Government Investment Pool catastrophe last year and the current problem with OFR licensing thugs convicted of every crime imaginable? And, I don't need a civics lesson--the Office of Financial Regulation has oversight, supposedly, by the Financial Services Commission, of which Sink IS one of the four members. She is also supposed to be the protector of our tax dollars, to hear her tell it. She isn't running DFS, she's running for a higher office. Her non-elected chief of staff runs DFS. Please!

Anything for a press release... Her marketing and communication sections tell her what to do, and how to do it.

9:55pm is right on, DFS is merely a stepping stone for which her efforts are only focused on items that will enhance her "Public" image.