Via YouTube.

This started out as a simple post about how a woman from Rockville discovered she had more than one million in unclaimed stocks and dividends.

You know, a feel good story about how if you would just enter your name into the state databases that track unclaimed property, you’d discover untold riches—or at least some pizza money you didn’t know you had. For what it is worth, you should go do that. A woman just found one million dollars!

Turns out her friend had recommended she look for her name in the 192-page insert that the Maryland comptroller’s office recently published in 30 newspapers around the state (it’s required by law to do this annually). The woman, a senior who wished to remain anonymous, called the office instead to check and promptly discovered she is one million dollars richer, said Michelle Byrnie-Parker, a spokeswoman at the comptroller’s office.

Here are the Virginia, D.C., and Maryland links.

But I digress. This story is no longer about that lucky, lucky woman. This is about what I found after I went digging around on the comptroller’s website. Namely, the amazing lo-fi advertising campaign they’ve created to try to get Marylanders to reclaim their money (which you wouldn’t think would be that hard, but, according to Byrnie-Parker, the state is holding more than $1 billion in unclaimed property.)

To that end, Comptroller Peter Franchot appears in a YouTube video, hamming it up as Maryland’s 0033, a James Bond-esque agent. Your money “is missing, not lost,” he deadpans into the camera after cruising around in a 1978 Corvette.

A random dude in a lab coat promises in his best TV voice: “The very latest in interception countermeasures! And we auction items on eBay now, too!

Love everything about this as much as I do? As baffled as I am? There’s more.

Franchot has been doing this for the past few years, previously posing as Sherlock Franchot and the Most Interesting Man in Maryland.

And this is required by LAW. Ok, fine, not the specific campaign. But the comptroller is supposed to publicize all the new accounts that it is holding in the hopes of getting people to look up their names and enrich themselves with their own money. So they had some fun with it.

“It is a fun, clever way to get the word out to folks to check the unclaimed property newspaper insert or the online database,” Byrnie-Parker said. “[Franchot] does enjoy having the opportunity to advertise or get the word out through a fun and playful way.”

Sure, but you are no Sean Connery or Daniel Craig, Franchot. Still, better than Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond.