Morons of the day: NOT from Florida!
A Pennsylvania couple was arrested after BB&T accidentally put $120,000 in their account. Instead of notifying the bank, they decided to spend it.
Did they really think the bank wouldn’t figure it out? It’s not like finding a shopping bag full of cash, it’s your account, with your name and address on it and everything. “They’ll never know it was us!” :smack:
I ran across this a few days ago and the only thing I’ve heard them say is [her]“All I’ll say is that we got some bad legal advice”.
I think it’s safe to assume their ‘legal advice’ wasn’t from a lawyer, but rather someone (IRL or on the internet) said “If the bank makes a mistake, you get to keep the money”.
It seems like with all the stuff they bought, maybe they should have spent the first hundred dollars on a lawyer. Of course, I think most people know you won’t get to keep the money, or, at the very least, let it sit there for a few weeks before you spend all of it.
I bet their “legal advice” was a Monopoly card - “Bank Error in your favor - collect $100”.
I wouldn’t be shocked if 100 people had told them to report it, but they only heard the one person who said “It’s yours!”
Well see, if the bank error was in the form of a teller handing you an extra couple of bills when you made a cash withdrawal, as depicted on the Community Chest card in Monopoly, there would be no paper record of it. This… Not so much.
Many years ago, the weekly payroll of the local School System got deposited into my checking account.
I just happened to go to the ATM after the deposit and the balance was like 167,000 dollars, about 100x what I expected to be. I didn’t give it much thought, maybe I misread the balance on the screen.
When I balanced my checkbook a couple weeks later, I saw the deposit and later WD and made an inquiry. I was angry that I was not contacted by the bank, to explain the error.
FWIW, it happened again the next month
I wonder if there’s any way to take advantage of something like that – could a Swiss bank make that money “disappear” untraceably?
Maybe, but that wouldn’t erase the fact that the bank knows, for sure, it WAS in your account at some point, and now it’s not, even if they can’t find where it is now.
Reminds me of this awesome story where a guy deposits a “fake” check from a junk mailer, and penis ensues.
Sure, but can they make that stick to you if you never transferred it in, either? Imagine if through no action of yours, maybe even while you were away camping with no internet or phone for a week, a huge, unsolicited deposit was put into your account, “in error,” and a day or so later, transferred out to some other account they now cannot verify or track down, just as plausibly without your knowledge or consent as the initial mystery deposit. How could you be held liable?
In this case the money was obviously used by the account holders in question, to pay bills, make cash gifts, pay for purchases in their name (like a car), and so on.
And you would still owe it back, in full.
Are you sure that’s the word you wanted to use there? 
Obviously… I’m just musing about whether it’d be possible to get away with it by claiming “we didn’t move any money” and the bank not being able to prove that they did.
Probably the best you could do is transfer it immediately into a high interest savings account. When the bank finally figures it out (the later the better), you transfer them back the original amount. You keep the interest.
A deposit of $1000 was made to my SILs acct. He didn’t do it, he asked everyone who might like him enough to give him a gift. No one admitted to it. The bank only had ‘cash’ deposit into his acct.in their records. He sat on it for a long time. Eventually he spent it.
The mystery has never been solved.
Not only that, they were charged overdraft fees of $107,000. I wonder how they raised their $25,000 bail?
You mean to tell me what I learned way back when on the elementary school playground, “Finders keepers, losers weepers” is not legal advice? 
The funds were in their account when they made the various withdrawals. If they reversed the deposit current day, they should have few, if any, overdraft fees (except for the one big amount) but by backdating the reversal of the deposit the bank could create all of the overdraft fees. I also wonder how they got so high. Even if each overdraft fee was $100 they didn’t make that many 1000+ withdrawals did they? They bought some large ticket items which means there wasn’t that much money left to withdraw.
Old SDMB joke. So old, I can’t even find the original reference.
ETA:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5674741&postcount=2
I’ve seen news reports of similar bank errors and criminal charges aren’t unusual if the recipients spends the money.
Finders keepers doesn’t apply anymore.
Even money recovered from the street (dropped from a truck) has to be returned.
I don’t have much sympathy for these morons. Best they can do is sell the stuff they bought and return as much of the money as possible. It’ll take years to pay off the rest.
I’m assuming it’s in the bank’s interest not to actually lock these people up. They’ll never get their money back that way.
Banks are insured, I hear.