What happens when a bank makes a mistake and puts thousands of dollars into someone’s account?
While the idea of free money from the bank makes a nice daydream, practical and noble thoughts of calling the bank to correct the error are likely to win out for most people who actually end up in this situation.
But for one teen that recently saw an extra US$31,000 (AUD$33,000) in his account, the first thing to do was go on a major shopping spree.
It all started on 7th March 2014, when a man named Steven Fields in Madison County in the US made a $31,000 deposit into his bank account.
Unfortunately for First Citizens Bank, several Steven Fields have accounts with them and the teller ended up putting the money into the wrong account.
So when the 18-year-old Steven Fields checked his bank balance and found he had $31,000 more than he thought, he withdrew most of it ($20,000) and spent another $5000 using his debit card.
The bank realised their mistake when the older Steven Fields called to report his missing money. They contacted the teen and requested he return the money, but young Fields declined, claiming the money was actually from an inheritance.
The police report says that when police visited Fields, he stated that he “thought the money came from his grandmother’s estate.”
“I informed Mr Fields that the bank wanted the money back as soon as possible,” the reporting officer’s statement explains.
“Mr Fields stated that he would go to the bank and talk with [the teller responsible] and try to settle this situation without going to jail.”
Fields spent the money at a car dealership, various retail stores and a fast food joint, actually eluding the bank and authorities for over a week before he eventually turned himself in. The latest media reports state that he is charged with “theft by taking” after he admitted he could not afford to repay the money.
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Young Fields is not the only person to try and make the most out of a transaction mistake. In 2009, a couple in New Zealand made headlines when they disappeared after receiving NZ$10 million (AUD$9.2 million) from a Westpac mix-up.
According to reports at the time, the petrol station owners had requested a $10,000 overdraft that was approved but mistakenly processed as $10 million due to what the bank said was a “human error”.
For the couple, whose business was seriously struggling, it must have seemed like a happy mistake. They took the money and ran, actually getting years out of it before things finally caught up with them in 2012 when they were sentenced to prison and home detention.
But not everyone takes this kind of money and runs with it. In 2012 a schoolteacher in India checked his balance online and found an additional 496 billion rupees (about AUD$9 billion at the time) – substantially more than his salary of 35,000 rupees (AUD$617).
“I called up a friend in the bank and joked, maybe money is overflowing in your bank, that’s why your system has remitted so much money into my account,” he told the BBC, which also reported that the government-run State Bank of India (SBI) did not explain what happened.
Unlike the people above, this honest teacher decided to withdraw his own money (about $200) and wait for the bank – whose motto is actually “Safe Banking with SBI” – to sort out the rest of the huge balance.
“Even though I got my money back, the account still holds the billions of dollars as uncleared amount. I don’t know how long I’ll have to keep that astronomical figure in my account,” he told the BBC.
Hopefully SBI gave him interest benefits on the amount when he was waiting for the issue to be resolved but if not, at least his actions saved him an international manhunt and jail time.
Although it’s nice to think about what you could do if the bank paid you, or if money could magically appear in your account, there are clearly other costs to consider if it actually does happen. It’s very rare to get something for nothing in the banking world, after all, so if a balance seems too good to be true then it probably is.
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