Goody two-shoes couple finds extra $50 billion in their bank account, promptly return it
We would have totally done the exact same thing... totally.
Aux Features Money
There are approximately two (2) people in the entire world who conceivably deserve $50 billion: Beyoncé, and Dolly Parton. But other than them, we can’t think of any instance in which that amount of genuinely inconceivable wealth shouldn’t be interpreted as a crime against humanity.
That said, we wouldn’t hold it against the Average Joe if, upon stumbling upon an extra $50 billion in their checking account one morning, they suddenly absconded to a Caribbean nation with nebulous tax laws. That’s recently what happened to a couple in Baton Rouge, Louisiana… well, the first part about an extra $50B in the bank, not the absconding part. They actually did the “right” (read: boring) thing and returned all of it.
As Newsweek reports, the James family was somewhat surprised to find the approximate wealth of Michael Bloomberg suddenly in their bank account one morning after attempting to transfer money to their daughter. “It was crazy just to see what it looks like because I’ve never seen that many zeros in my life,” Darren James told BR Proud. “I wasn’t going to keep it. The thing that was most baffling was, we don’t even know where it came from. We don’t know anybody with that kind of money.”
After screenshotting the ridiculous amount, the couple informed their bank, which then took another four days to rectify the error… which is kind of a jackass move on the bank’s part, given that that’s a long time to stare forlornly at life-changing wealth that technically isn’t yours. No explanation has been provided as to how so much money suddenly found its way into the James’ bank account, although it’s probably safe to say it was some mundane computer glitch or the like.
For those shaking their fists at their computer screens while vowing that they would have done things a little differently if $50 billion showed up on their account, Newsweek notes a recent, similar situation in which a person attempted to do just that: Kelyn Spadoni (also of Louisiana, oddly enough) recently found an extra $1.2 million in their possession, and quickly diverted some of that windfall into a different account to purchase a new car and house. Authorities were quick to notice, however, and arrested Spadoni in April, since that technically counts as theft of property lost by mistake and/or receiving stolen property…
Which is sorta horseshit given, y’know, everything about Wall Street.
[via BoingBoing]
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]
74 Comments
I’ll bet the bank attempted to hit them with a service charge for making the correction.
The company that bought the company I used to work for transferred my 401(K) to another investment firm, then charged me $75 and a shitload of paperwork to transfer it all back.
The company I work for bought another company, and while the ticker symbol remained the same there was some underlying code that changed. Etrade charged everyone in the employee stock purchase plan $38 dollars to change that code on everyone’s shares, and some people like me got charged twice.
I’m willing to bet the balance of that account after the snafu was $50,000,000,068.35.
People Smart Enough to Know What Fraud Is Make Correct Choice
If the bank erred in giving me an extra $50, I’d probably order some pizza to celebrate. If they erred in giving me an extra $50 billion, you bet I’d call the bank. You can’t actually do anything with that kind of money without the authorities noticing.
Buy the authorities!
Have your country and authorities.
When I was eighteen a friend of mine checked his bank balance one day and it had grown by 100,000 overnight. He withdrew 300 bucks and then freaked out and put it back in like five minutes later. Then next day he was back to his original fifty or so dollar balance.
If the bank erred in giving me an extra $50, I’d probably order some pizza to celebrate. If they erred in giving me an extra $50 billion — you would be able to get MORE pizza. Think, man!
After screenshotting the ridiculous amount, the couple informed their bank, which then took another four days to rectify the error… To bad it wasn’t an interest-earning account. Four days of interest on $50,000,000,000 would probably be a pretty nice sum.
I was trying to figure this out, but all the compound interest calculators I find on line max out at $10M and require at least a year of interest.If it is in a passbook earning 1% simple interest, that would be $500M in a year, so a little less than $5.5M in 4 days. Good work if you can get it, as they say.
Assuming their bank compounds interest monthly (based on the daily average balance), with an average checking account interest rate of 0.01% and $50k in the bank the other 26 days, their daily average would work out to ~6.9bn and their interest earned would be ~$690k.
Presently the best rate seems to be 0.50% APY, so they’d be lucky to get $2.7M.
It should be a law that if a bank screws up and puts X million dollars in your account you get to keep one week’s worth of interest on that money. It’d be life-changing money for a lot of people and wouldn’t even be missed by whomever actually has the $50 million dollars.
If you insist on using whom and whomever, you might want to swot up on the difference between subject and object pronouns.
*Too (argh!)
Four days of interest on $50,000,000,0001. That’s 50 billion dollars. ($1 million has 6 zeros not 9.)2. At the rate of interest US banks give (less than 1%), 4 days interest would be less than $6,000.I’m assuming you’re not very good with money.
I can think of a number of people who deserve a billion. None of them already have a billion, however.
Just a trivial matter: Shouldn’t the past tense of screenshot be “screenshooting?”
I believe it is “Screenshitted”
The way I do it, yes.
That does make sense.
Screenshat?
Past tense? The problem here is that they are trying to verb a noun. A screenshot is a shot OF a screen, not something shot BY a screen. It’s not a verb. But English gonna English so people say “Oh, did you screenshot that?” instead of “Oh did you take a screenshot?” and soon enough you get writers thinking oh well the rule for prepositional phrases is you add ‘ing’ to the verb, so “after screenshotting”…“After taking a screenshot of” is the correctmost English good.
These are all perfectly cromulent words.
“Screenshotting” might sound a little weird, but it’s no different than “photographing,” which would have originally been, “take a photograph,” or “filming,” which would have been “make a film.” I’m sure there were 19th century scolds who just couldn’t handle the way people were turning those particular nouns into verbs.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
“Screenshat”
Screenshooting would be the present continuous.The problem here is that they are trying to verb a noun. The problem is he’s talking about grammar as if he’s familiar with it.
It is an interesting mental exercise to try to figure out how they could have kept it. If they had indeed transferred it to an account in the Caymans or Switzerland or something, or just withdrawn it all, and then fled – could they have pulled it off?
You mean go to the local branch and inform the teller that they’d like to close their account and they’ll take that in 500 million hundred dollar bills, please? Sounds like that should be pretty easy to pull off.
I was more thinking like going to different branches and withdrawing in $10K increments to avoid reporting to the IRS. What would work? We’re having fun here. Help me figure out how to get away with it, Rollo Tomassi!
What would work? Nothing, I think. Even taking out a little at a time would get noticed in a few days, most likely. Theoretically, by that point you could have fled to another country, but you’d probably have at most something like 100 grand. The Bitcoin idea someone mentioned above would probably be your best bet, but even that seems really dicey.
You’d have to go 5 million bank branches to pull that off. If you could visit one per minute, it would take you 9.5 years to accomplish.
Even in $100 bills, that would weigh over 550 tons. The internet tells me that a standard Brinks armored truck can hold about half a billion. So you’ll need 100 of those trucks lined up outside, plus all the necessary forklifts and stuff to move the pallets around.You’re gonna have some work to do for sure. Luckily, you’re rich enough, you could pay all the Brinks folks and forklift operators and stuff and never even notice. You’ll need to also hire 4 or 5 Boeing 747 Freighters (135 or so tons payload each) to get it out of the country. That won’t be cheap, but, again, you can afford it.
When I closed my personal accounts at Wells Fargo to switch to the Credit Union across the street, they wanted to charge me $6 for a cashier’s check. I balked at that, because it felt like a last little “screw you” to help remind me why I was ditching them in the first place.I calmly told them that I wasn’t going to pay for a cashier’s check, and that I wanted my balance in cash instead. I was hoping they’d give it to me in linen sacks with dollar signs on them, but, alas, to “protect my safety” they just cut the cashier’s check gratis.
“They will find you unless they think you’re already dead.”
Would it flag the authorities if you used it to buy some cryptocurrency with it? If that worked, then take your hard drive wallet, get on a plane to, I don’t know, Moscow, or Kazakhstan, or somewhere else with no extradition treaty, then profit? I mean, I’m sure the authorities wherever you go will want their pound of flesh to take you in, but, still…
I think I’d rather have a middle class life in the USA (or better, Canada/Western Europe) with freedom to travel and not be forever waiting for my misdeeds to catch up with me than be trapped forever in Moscow or Kazakhstan even with a few million dollars.
A few million, probably, but a few Billion!? I reckon you could make yourself mighty comfortable anywhere with that. Probably not Moscow though, admittedly, since old Putin would probably have his eye on your billions from the word go.
But enough about the former president.
yes it would flag authorities because the ‘debit’ out of the account to buy the crypto is reported by the bank.
*trying to imagine someone withdrawing 50 billion dollars*
I think the issues I see would be 1) personally getting somewhere that would not extradite you back to the States, 2) I’m guessing it takes a few days at least to transfer that much money so you’d need to get it moved (probably twice) before anyone knew it was gone. I say move it twice bc I’d want to move it out of the States immediately and into like a cayman account then move it again to like a Swiss account. After that you’d need to diversify and such but you might be in the clear assuming you never come back to the US or any country that would extradite you.
The problem isn’t even transferring the money because you will never get that far.
Moving large sums of money requires equally large sums of paperwork.Nobody ever gets that.Fifty billion dollars could be transferred sure, from a corporate banking location, in a major financial center, with an appointment, with sixty days notice, while wearing a ten thousand dollar Italian suit, with about a thirty page declaration to the government, to a properly certified and registered corporate account. They would however still ask why the money was in your personal checking account, where the money came from, and why you thought you would get away with this. But they would be more polite about it…….you also might end up in a nicer club fed style jail.
caveat is that the ‘right’ bank cough*Deutsche*cough might be able to do some things less than by the book.also caveat that said ‘special’ banks, likely intercepted that stray 50 billion for themselves so you never saw it anyway!
Pretty sure even Switzerland or the Caymans would balk at transferring that. I’d at least hope so.
Read the article, ffs.
Someone literally did that and was arrested.
Lol, I have been doing exactly that!🤔 I went through many scenarios in my head and they all end with being arrested or returning the darn money.🤷🏻♀️ Well, I tried.
What is with the “technically counts as theft”. Is it “technically” theft if someone parks their car in front of my house and forgets the keys on the seat and I drive away with it? Or is that also just theft?
A similar incident happened to me last year. A law firm deposited $6k by mistake into my account. Knowing how the law works I immediately called them to get it fixed. I wasn’t fucking around at all with that.
You do realize that you are legally obligated to return money deposited in your account by accident right? This isn’t Monopoly rules…
Sure, just prove to me that it was done by accident (as opposed to a secret benefactor, or the wish I made while rubbing that lamp), then prove to me who the rightful owner is, and prove to me that they themselves acquired this money by legitimate means, and then I’ll withdraw the money and hand it back in cash form. (Why cash? Well, I just don’t trust banks these days.)
If Monopoly had the same rules as real life, the banker could insist on charging an extra couple of bucks for every transaction. They’d win the game every time.
…or “Negro Rules”
“Hi, there seems to be an issue with my account there are uhhhhh… 49 billion dollars in there that aren’t mine”
4 days to fix it? They should’ve been allowed to keep any interest earned during that period.
Aww, good for them.
happened to me 2 weeks ago. My Chase account that I share with my daughter suddenly had $50 billion, upon checking my account. It said there was a “hold” on that amount making it over 4.9 billion in the negative…unfortunately tying up my actual savings. I immediately called the bank and they gave me some nonsense about my account being shared and I was the custodial person. They said that since my daughter was now an adult, we needed to close this account or remove her. They said this could be done over the phone “today” or by coming into an office. (It was a weekend) Say what?! What does that have to do with 50 BILLION DOLLARS in my account.The next day I checked the account again and it said hold has been released. By Monday, three days later, it was gone from my account. Crazy! I had my husband take a pic of my phone to keep a record of the money since you can’t screenshot bank info.I researched and found out this is nothing new. It’s happened for years back since 2014 with Chase. It’s definitely made me think twice about our money being safe in the bank.
For their honesty, let them keep the few days of interest. That should last them a while.
That was BTC 1.45 million.
Which today is now worth BTC 600,000.
If Hans Gruber wasn’t going to steal millions of dollars without faking his own death in the process, I doubt these people would get away with knocking off 50 billion.
He did a heck of a fake out job by pretending to fall off of the tower.
My mother worked for a bank for 40 years. I heard enough stories of people who thought they could keep mistakenly deposited money to know you can’t keep the money.There’s a NZ couple that had to go on the run after they tried to keep $10 million. Then they went to jail.
…BECAUSE THEY WERE WHITE!
I would have donated a few billion to various homelessness and child welfare organizations and then let the bank admit that they are taking the money from these needy people.
Did they get to collect interest on it for those 4 days?
Every time I read about one of these “oops” transactions I just have to laugh.You can’t keep it.Good on these folks for realizing that simple fact.It’s just weird however that it’s happened twice in such a short time frame in the same state. Usually these things get chalked up to once in a lifetime computer glitches. Somewhere there is a computer, router, or something in need of an upgrade.
When will we learn: only the rich get away with stealing money – even money that lands in your account accidentally, through no fault of your own. The rest of us can go f ourselves.
Immediately go to the bank and withdraw 1 mil cash. I’d want a comically large bag with dollar signs on it. Take some shots for IG and promptly deposit back in the account. Then contact the authorities.