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If you spotted a S$5 note on the ground, would you pick it up?

Some might, but as it turns out, many others won’t. 

Audrey (@audreythiloy), a French woman who has been living in Singapore for two years, recently found herself asking a similar question after spotting a S$5 note lying on the ground in Bugis on Monday (Sep 28). 

Audrey tells 8days.sg she'd already been watching the note for about two minutes before she started filming.

By her estimate, around 10 people walked past. Nobody picked it up.

Puzzled, she took to TikTok to share the incident. 

"Singaporeans are so weird, bro. There is S$5 on the floor and nobody is taking the S$5. I don't know why. Maybe they are cursed or something,” Audrey said in her video.

While there's no way of knowing whether the people who walked past were actually Singaporeans or visitors, the encounter still left Audrey baffled. 

According to her, the note wasn't hidden somewhere people could easily miss.

"That was actually the weirdest part: it was clearly visible on the ground, but people somehow seemed not to register it," she tells us.

She also wondered: Are Singaporeans simply too rich to bother picking up S$5?

But after living here for two years, she was genuinely baffled that around 10 people could walk past a perfectly visible S$5 note without anyone taking it.

And then came one passer-by who certainly didn't help dispel her "too rich" theory.

"At one point, a man carrying a Louis Vuitton bag literally stepped on it, dragged it slightly with his shoe and then accidentally kicked it, all without seeming to notice it was there. I found that hilarious and so strange,” she said.

"I genuinely expected it to be gone within five seconds. If it had just been a few cents, I wouldn't have thought twice about it, but S$5 felt like enough money that I expected someone to notice immediately,” she said.

Audrey thinks it would have played out very differently back home in France.

"I honestly think S$5 — or even the equivalent of S$2 — would probably disappear from the ground within seconds," she says, adding that her friends and family back home agreed when she told them what happened.

Now here's the plot twist. Audrey didn't pick it up either.

"I don't really know why, but to me it feels like bad luck to pick up something that doesn't belong to you. More than anything, it just doesn't really align with my values,” she muses.

She and her companions stayed around for a while, though Audrey declined to say who, if anyone, eventually took the money.

After Audrey posted the video, commenters offered another possible explanation for why the S$5 was being left alone.

"A lot of people in the comments told me that in Singapore you're not supposed to pick up something that doesn't belong to you," she says.

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Photos: mas.gov, audreythiloy/IG