The Time I Was Accidentally Given $250,000

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The Time I Was Accidentally Given $250,000

By Greg | December 17, 2006

Weird Banking Events ™ seem to follow me around in life. The weirdest happened a little while back, when my bank inadvertently multiplied a deposit by 1000 times, mistakenly crediting the account with over a quarter of a million dollars. Give it back, or make travel plans to take refuge in a small South American country?

Several times each month, my company receives small payments via direct bank transfer from advertisers in different parts of the world. Because the payments frequently go out in dollars, I often don’t know the precise amount that will show up in the company’s British pound sterling bank account. I keep a close watch for new deposits as they arrive and note them down in a spreadsheet, matching up the pound amounts which have arrived with the dollar amounts which were sent. I’m accustomed to seeing deposits of anywhere from a hundred pounds to a few thousand pounds, and it’s usually easy to tell which transfers match up with which advertisers.

So I was more than a bit shocked one morning to discover a deposit of £156,500.00 — or something well over $250,000! How could that be right? Yet there it was, plain as day on the computer screen: yesterday, we had a balance of a couple of thousand pounds, today we have a balance equivalent to several years’ income. And by the time I discovered it, we were already racking up more interest in a single day than we’d usually receive all month.

Unless we had some mysterious and previously unknown benefactor out there, I was pretty sure this was a mistake. I decided to leave it for a day or two before worrying too much about it, assuming that the bank would discover pretty quickly if they had misplaced such a large chunk of cash.

(Already, the seeds of thoughts were growing in the back of my mind: OK, so it’s a mistake, but what if they don’t discover it? Could I transfer the cash out into a higher interest bank account, just temporarily? Oooh, could I just transfer it out, end of story?)

A few days passed, and there was no sign from the bank that anything was wrong. Other transfers were going just fine, interest was accruing…

I started checking to see whether any of the payments we were expecting had failed to arrive on time. Hmm, yes, here was a clue: a US dollar payment which, allowing for charges and the spread in the currency exchange rate, could have come in at around that amount…if I were to multiply it by a factor of 1000. We hadn’t received that payment, apparently, but when I checked with the advertiser, all was fine: they checked with their own bank and confirmed that they had sent out the correct amount on the day intended.

It was looking like I should have received £156.50 but instead wound up with £156,500.00. The advertiser had sent the correct amount, but the bank had credited 1000 times that much. The mistake was the bank’s.

(More thoughts in the back of my mind: OK, the sender didn’t really lose that money, it was money that was just ‘created’ by a 3-digit mistake on the part of the bank. Who would miss out if the bank didn’t get it back? OK, apart from all the shareholders and the little old ladies’ pension funds…)

Quick vague email to the company accountant: hypothetically speaking, if there were to be an accounting mistake to our benefit, and it was entirely the bank’s own fault, would we be justified in holding on to the results of the mistake? Alas, accountants generally seem to have that whole black-and-white thing going for them, and the reply came back pretty quickly, reminding me that someone holding onto money which is not rightfully theirs is breaking the law.

(More serious thoughts in the back of my mind: had I really seriously considered absconding with that kind of money? No, surely I hadn’t. Had I? What if the accountant had been ambiguous in his reply? Or what if he’d just said take the money and run? Had I just experienced one of those critical points in life, where a huge chain of events could have been set in motion? No, surely not…)

I wrote to the bank, asking them to confirm the status of the transfer.

There was nothing for several days, and daily interest continued to accrue on over a quarter of a million dollars that really shouldn’t have been there. Then I received an impersonal form letter, saying they were sorry they had given me reason to complain (!) and promising to look into the matter. (Complain???)

I imagined some processing clerk sitting there generating the standard ‘complaints’ reply form letter, blissfully unaware of the sheer size of the mistake I had just alerted them to.

Weeks passed, and I started wondering again… What if they really do think they did the transfer correctly? What if no error flags popped up anywhere in the process, and as far as they’re concerned, all is well? We could buy a house!

Then another form letter arrived, confirming that a mistake had occurred when the transfer was credited, and indicating the mistake had now been rectified. (Rats, it’s gone!) They hoped that they had resolved the complaint to my satisfaction. (Oh, I guess so.) They took customer complaints very seriously and wanted to assure me that should any other matters arise in the future, they would take them equally seriously.

Hold on a minute! They were missing £156,500.00, and they only say they hope they’ve resolved my ‘complaint’ to my satisfaction? Wow, I thought they might have been a bit more excited about recovering that much money, but the form letter almost sounded as if there weren’t any humans involved in the process at all — just a couple of automated computer processes designed to fix up any little mistakes.

So as quickly as it arrived, it was gone! No more thoughts in the back of my mind about quietly absconding with their money, no more dreams of what we could do with that sort of windfall. No more chance of being arrested for serious fraud, either, I suppose. The £156,500.00 disappeared, and in its place, a measly £156.50. At least the spreadsheet was all balanced out now.

Just to cap off the whole peculiar experience with the bank that seemed so un-bothered by the mistaken deposit, they never did claw back any of the interest they had already paid. In a single month, we wound up collecting more interest than in all the rest of the year combined.

I didn’t mention it.

They didn’t ask.

Tags: business, money