The "runaway bride" that cost taxpayers who knows how much money has sold the rights to her story for $500,000. Is she going to have to pay for all the efforts that went into searching for her? I would be in favor of laws that allowed the government to increase fines charged to people who do things like this if it is discovered that they have profited from their wrongdoing. She should pay back at least the cost of the search, at least up to the amount she's getting for the story. And given that there are opportunity costs beyond the financial costs (might some of the searchers have spent time looking for someone else if they hadn't been searching for her?), fining her a lot more than the financial cost would not be out of line.