What would You Do? Spend it?

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fountainhall

What would You Do? Spend it?

Post by fountainhall »

Suppose you check your bank balance on an ATM machine. You are amazed to discover that there is $120,000 more than you expected. What do you do? Report it? Spend it?

That is what happened to Robert and Tiffany Williams in Pennsylvania. The discovered the cash on 31 May. The bank only noticed the error on June 20. It should have been remitted instead to an investment firm. By then the couple had spent $107,000.

Clearly the erroneous deposit was the bank's fault. Yet the Williams' have now been charged with theft plus over $100,000 in overdraft fees.

If you found a windfall in your account and no-one claimed it for three weeks, would you spend it? My only experience of ATM errors was when in the late evening at an ATM far from my home I punched in a request for HK$600 (less than US$84). About HK$4,000 then spewed out. What was I supposed to do? Leave it there for the next customer to pick it up? So I took it. Around midday the following day the bank called, informed me it had noticed the error and asked me to go way out of my way to return it. I did, but I always wondered what would have happened if I had not.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49643015
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Re: What would You Do? Spend it?

Post by Gaybutton »

You would have to be out of your mind to spend it. it's not a windfall, it's a mistake by the bank. Anybody should realize that and should also realize if you spend it and cannot immediately replace it, you're going to find yourself in a hell of a lot of legal trouble.

While it was not the fault of these people that the bank made this sort of mistake, they tried to take advantage of the situation instead of doing the right thing, and now they are probably going to jail and will lose much more money than they thought they had gained.

"You were a little too clever and now you are caught!"
- Adolfo Celi (Largo), 'Thunderball'
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