As a fancy-camera-owner, I can relate to this story.

So there was this woman named Judith who went on vacation to Hawaii with a fancy camera.  Unfortunately, show lost the camera in one of the Hawaiian parks.  She reported the camera as missing to the local park ranges, and started a Flickr website trying to recreate her photos with those from others who have gone to Hawaii.

Earlier this month she received a call from a park ranger telling her that a Canadian couple reported finding her camera and giving her their name and number.  She then called the family and they verified that, yes, they had her camera, even describing specifics like the color of a rubber band she had wrapped around it.

Then the family dropped bomb number one:  they told her that their nine year old son found the camera, and while they wanted to show him how to do the right thing by calling, he'd been using it for a week and they didn't want to take it away from him.  They then also told her this story about how the child was recently diagnosed with diabetes and was convinced he was cursed with bad luck, and they thought taking the camera away would prove it.

Plus they had spent "a lot of money" to get a charger and memory card.

"This is an expensive camera, you know," Judith told them, to which they replied, "Oh, we know, we looked it up."

Finally, figuring that there was no way this family was going to give her the camera back, she proposed that they just send her the memory card with her photos along with $50 for the camera.  Two weeks later a package arrived, but it only contained some CDs with the photos.  "We need the memory cards to operate the camera properly" an enclosed note read.

When she called the family back about their keeping the memory cards and not sending the money, she was told that she should be happy they sent anything at all, as most people wouldn't even do that.  Yeah, they're real good people.

You can read Judith's account first-hand at her site by clicking here. 

There is some debate in her comments as to whether she should post the family's name and address on the web.  While I don't agree with doing that (I could imagine quite a few people that really have nothing to do with this harassing the family for some time), but I do think she should direct the family and the local authorities to her online account to see if she can pressure them into doing the right thing, as they claimed they originally wanted to do.