A social media post helped a tour guide find 29 South Korean passports that he'd lost Monday, from a landfill in the central city of Da Nang. 

They were found the same night after the landfill management company responded to the post and deployed hundreds of employees and trash collectors to search for the documents.

27 out of the 29 passports are found in the Khanh Son landfill in Da Nang,
January 20, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Quang.

Le Hau, the tour guide, went to a shop on Le Duan Street in Thanh Khe District Monday afternoon with 29 passports belonging to a group of South Korean tourists visiting the country for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

When he found that the passports, kept in a plastic bag, were later lost, he suspected that they might have been stolen by someone who thought it was a bag of money. Hau posted his loss on Facebook, appealing for help in finding it.

Netizens shared the post with a Facebook group with over 99,000 members, prompting the management company of the Khanh Son Landfill, which processes trash for the entire city, to enlist hundreds of employees and trash collectors to look for the bag.

The company suspected that anyone who took the bag had thrown it away after finding out it was just passports.

The company narrowed down the search for the bag by collecting info regarding the time the bag was lost and the time trucks go around the city to collect trash, among other factors, said Vo Diep Ngoc Quang, the company’s deputy director.

All 29 passports were found among the trash and scattered in the surrounding areas by midnight. They were returned to Hau Tuesday morning.