Countless city commuters walked past $16,000 in Sydney last week.

If you’re already struggling to get through this midweek hump day and live in Sydney, there’s some more bad news coming your way. Because if you happen to travel through Circular Quay on your daily morning commute, there’s a good chance you walked straight past $16,000 of cold, hard, no-strings-attached cash last week.

Take a second to process that information if you need, we’ll wait right here.

The experiment, which was initiated by Australian savings and cashback site Cashrewards last Thursday, consisted of a two-metre board with the words "Get Cash" emblazoned in the middle being set up on the eastern side of Circular Quay.

And if that wasn't clear enough, every last inch of the board was covered in $16,000 worth of $100 notes.

Talk about an obvious sell.

Incredibly, just $1,700 was given away to people game enough to stop, because it seems that despite living in the modern age of the great Aussie giveaway, we still seem pretty distrustful of anything that even moderately resembles a free lunch.

“We predicted that initially people wouldn’t bite and take the money," Cashrewards co-founder Lorica Clarke said, adding, "However, we didn’t think that 90 per cent of people would ignore it. We couldn’t believe it."

The decision to run the Circular Quay giveaway came after a recent survey revealed that 72 per cent of Australians are sceptical of receiving money for nothing when online shopping.

And now we know that when offered in real life, we're even more sceptical.

(We're betting that if that money had been slipped into a dodgy Christmas card and put under a tree it would have been grabbed up far more quickly.)

So next time you see the words "Get Cash" on your way to work, it might be worth stopping.