Man behind @HiddenCash drops money in NYC, Houston, Mexico City

The man behind the @HiddenCash Twitter account was at it again Saturday, sending residents of New York City, Houston and Mexico City scrambling for envelopes he’d stashed in all three cities.

“Our biggest day ever! Houston, Mexico City, NYC today! Be safe, be kind, tweet when you find!” he wrote Saturday morning.

Clues told followers that the New York packages would be secreted away in Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Envelopes stuffed with $50 were scooped up by alert Twitter users within hours.

“Found in Prospect Park! Holy (expletive)!! Thanks @HiddenCash !!!” tweeted Julia Beatty, a writer.

Houston residents were scampering through Discovery Green Park a short time later, while people in Mexico City were urged to hunt down envelopes in Chapultepec Park, according to the Twitter account. Two hours into the scramble, there were roughly 20 envelopes left in Houston and Brooklyn.

Earlier this week, Bay Area real estate investor Jason Buzi revealed himself as the man behind the account. He gave his first public interview to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and explained his motivation behind the cash drops.

“I’ve done well, and some of my friends that are involved with it have done very well as well,” Buzi said in the CNN interview. “Typically, when people give back, they do it through charity. And we do that, too ... I’ve said from the beginning, this is not instead of charity.”

Buzi estimated he gave away between $10,000 and $15,000 when he started tweeting out the location of money stashes in parts of Los Angeles, Bakersfield and Sacramento in late May.

The pay-it-forward mentality seems to have spread to Hassan Bundu-Kamara, a 29-year-old New York City resident who found an envelope wedged between rocks in Central Park.

Bundu-Kamara told the Los Angeles Times he looked up at other people scouring the area, their eyes darting from their smartphones to the ground in search of cash, and saw a little girl among the search party.

So he handed his envelope over.

“I didn’t really get anything from it except giving her a little smile,” he said.

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