Cold Cash

Cold Cash refers to people using the refrigerator or freezer as a place to store valuables, usually cash.

Examples of Cold Cash include:

Comic Books

• Parodied in a Scrooge McDuck comic where Uncle Scrooge fills his vault with refrigerators filled with his cash because fridges are the last place robbers look.
  • He apparently didn't realize that many burglars also like to take some late-night snack when they're at it.
• In the Violent Tendencies storyline, Robin, Spoiler and Violet are lead by the Penguin to a fish processing place with the money hidden under the ice. It's fake, but Violet tries to steal it anyway, until they're ambushed by the Korean Mafia.

Film

• Shaft
• Coyote Ugly. Violet's best friend tosses a roll of cash into her freezer in case of emergency.
  • ...and even that is cleaned out after robbers ransack the apartment.
• Apparently done in that Confessions of a Shopaholic movie... the trailer shows the main character pulling her credit card out of the freezer, where she's stored it in a block of ice to try and prevent herself from actually using it, although this is also seriously recommended by financial recovery sites as a method for reducing credit card use.
• The Whoopi Goldberg movie Burglar has her robbing someone's apartment, as a thief-for-hire, looking for jewelry belonging to the woman who hired her. The loot is discovered inside boxes of frozen foods hidden in the freezer.
• In Uptown Girls, one of the first scenes features Molly Gunn taking money from her freezer before going to a party. In her case, is to show both how rich and how much of a airhead and disconnected from reality she used to be.
• The 2006 film The Sentinel has Michael Douglas as a framed Secret Service agent who finds a foreign operative who is part of the conspiracy, and when doing a search of his apartment, rips the magnetic seal around the refrigerator door and finds fake passports and bricks of cash inside the door.
• In the Wim Wenders movie Until the End of the World (1991), the main character, Claire Tourneur, uses a futuristic looking fridge to stash the bills bank robbers gave her for transporting their loot into Paris.

Literature

• Variation: In one of the Anastasia Krupnik books, it's revealed that Anastasia's father keeps his manuscripts-in-progress in the crisper, in case the house burns down.
• One Tales of the Unexpected short story had a couple hide a diamond in the ice tray, but a burglar found it anyway. Turns out he'd helped himself to a drink and swallowed it.

Live Action TV

• An episode of Law and Order had a hitman hiding his payoff money inside his fridge. Detectives easily find it because he put it in a box of corn flakes, and remark he was only "half-right" about the hiding-valuables-in-the-fridge trick.
• In the online segment "Ask a Spy" from Burn Notice, Michael reveals that hiding valuables in the freezer isn't a good idea because professional thieves will find the loot easily.
• Almost subverted in an episode of Stargate SG-1. Colonel Mayborne is strongarmed by Jack O'Neill into revealing some top secret information that is stored on Mayborne's computer. The only way that Mayborne can start up his computer without it setting off a booby-trap and frying itself is to insert a special floppy disk into the drive. Where does he keep the disk? In the tiny gap *between* the fridge and freezer sections of his fridge-freezer, rather than in the deep freeze altogether.
• Gloriously lampshaded in The Golden Girls when their house was robbed. When Blanche discovered her jewels missing from their hiding place in the flour, Dorothy tells her everyone hides their valuables in the flour and the freezer.

Blanche "The freezer's my other hiding place."
Dorothy "It's everybody's. The robbers know that. They don't even open drawers anymore.

• • At the end of the episode, it's discovered that the jewels were actually hidden in the freezer which was the one place the robbers did NOT look.
• From Monty Python's The Money Song:

I've got ninety-thousand Pounds in my pajamas,
I've got forty-thousand French Francs in my fridge...

• The "freezing room" in Estate of Panic, including a deep freeze with ice cream bars that had money hidden in them.
• Hustle: 'Liability' Finch keeps his entire stash hidden in his freezer.
• In Modern Family, Luke keeps his money in the freezer after hearing about frozen assets.

Video Games

• Variant: In Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches, the key to the study (in which some items of value can be found) is hidden in the refrigerator.

Western Animation

• Fillmore!: One Crook Of The Week hid the ledger of his crimes in the freezer. In the fishsticks box.
• In an episode of DuckTales (1987), robbers looking for the resident Gadgeteer Genius's latest invention crack into his safe, and find his lunch. Reasoning that the inventor's a little absent minded, they look in the fridge and sure enough, the invention is in there.
• Scooby Doo: Shaggy has an Uncle who once hid a cache of jewels inside a refrigerator. Shaggy's Uncle indeed.

Real Life

• Rep. William Jefferson had $90,000 stored in a freezer in his home. Found in August 2005, during a bribery investigation.
• Once there was a burglar who found some rolls of quarters in someone's freezer and stole them. He then spent the quarters, while they were still cold, at a nearby convenience store. When the police found out about this incident, they naturally considered it suspicious, and that is why this burglar was caught.