I think that the crime is not stealing but rather criminal conversion. That assumes that the extra $180,000 is still the companies property and I think it is. If I park my car on your driveway for the weekend, that doesn’t allow you to use it because it is not magically now yours being on your property. You doing so would be conversion not stealing.
For varying definitions of normal. Or billions.
In English law, it was only “theft” if you stole “some thing”. So maybe you stole some “bank notes”, and they compared the serial number on the notes in your possession, to the serial numbers of the stolen notes.
There was a separate crime “conversion”, where you used something without permission. Mostly applied to the use of land, and still a crime as such in a few places.
That was all too restrictive, so a bunch of new crimes were defined, including “fraud”, which includes stealing “money”, but does not require theft of “some thing”.
Anyway, there is a crime, the name of which I do not remember, which includes the situation where you take the office petty cash on Friday night, use it over the weekend, and put it back on Monday morning. It’s not “theft”, and it’s not “burglary” or “fraud”, but it’s a specific crime.
Actually, I say “it’s not theft”, but all crimes get redefined and renamed from time to time, so “theft” includes many different things in different jurisdictions.
People who have money accidently dropped in their bank account, and use it, are not normally charged with “that crime”, whatever its name is, so no, the situation as described in the OP is not a crime.
Except that sometimes, for some reason, which is never properly explained in the popular press, which seems just as unexplainable to them as to me, it is prosecuted sometimes.
And I’ve just seen a report of a long-running case, where the guy kept on withdrawing on his overdraft, and the bank kept on letting him withdraw more, and not charging interest or fees, and the dispute was about if he had “permission” to withdraw all that money, with the bank taking the position that of course he didn’t have permission to withdraw all that money, even though due to our own fault, we thought he had permission to withdraw all that money, and we’d actually told him so.
I had an irritating similar situation 40 years ago. My only satisfaction is that the bank was actually so badly managed, and had so little control, that a couple of years later all their money was stolen and the bank went bust.
You can with a “no fee” CD. It pays slightly less interest but you can cash it out anytime and receive the interest to date.
Sounds like embezzlement.
Say you own 2 bank accounts. Someone accidentally deposits $200,000 in Account A. The next day, they ask for it back, and you immediately pay them $200,000 from Account B. Did you commit a crime?
So I’m not sure if this was rhetorical or not, but of course it depends on how much you have in your account. If someone accidentally deposits $5 in my savings, which already had $1,473 in it, does it become theft if I withdraw $10? As long as what I’m withdrawing doesn’t require the use of the accidental funds, it can’t possibly be a crime.
This type of thing happens fairly often.
A Pennsylvania couple is facing felony theft charges after their bank accidentally put $120,000 in their account, and the couple spent most of it instead of contacting the bank, police said.
Robert and Tiffany Williams of Montoursville are also facing overdraft fees from the bank of about $107,000, according to the criminal complaint filed in the Lycoming County magisterial district court.
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I would think so. I guess there must be some sort of reasonable belief that the money wasn’t yours.
I would think so.
I asked my wife about this. She was a bank manager (WaMu) for many years in three different states.
If the amount improperly deposited (and temporarily withdrawn) is equal to or less than the amount already available in the account, then there’s no possible way to charge a crime or make a civil claim, because commingling of funds means the original amount is “still in” the account. The only way there’s an issue here, she says, is if the deposited (and withdrawn) amount exceeds the prior balance, which means the account holder had to touch that money.
Embezzlement requires a position of trust between the actor and the victim, such as that of a bank teller taking deposits from bank customers, properly crediting the money to the consumer’s account (so the consumer is not a victim), but then pocketing the money instead of depositing it in the bank. It’s not theft because they didn’t wrong obtain possession of the money (they had a right and were in fact required and entrusted to receive the money from the customer on behalf of the bank), but then they wrongfully exercised ownership rights over it, in violation of their position of trust from the bank (trusting them to then secure the money with the bank so that the bank could exercise its rights over the money). In fact the one thing I am sure about regarding the OP is that it is not embezzlement.
@Melbourne mentions conversion, which is an obscure enough crime in the US that when I had a civil case built on conversion (statutory conversion, as opposed to common law conversion, under a law in Michigan that allowed for triple damages to be awarded for statutory conversion, rather than merely being made whole as with common law conversion), spent many hours furrowing my browns, reading court case after court case, in a vain attempt to understand it. We didn’t even cover it in criminal law, that’s how obscure it was (and we covered a lot of obscure types of property crimes).
Maybe it fits, but then again I seem to recall that conversion could only apply (in Michigan, at least) to money if it was a non-fungible kind of money (eg: like a specific sum of money in a sack, or maybe a check, that existed physically—but don’t rely on me for this as it was a while ago and it seemed a fairly nuanced point of law). It might have also required that the money be earmarked for a specific purpose. In fact, maybe that was what mattered more than whether it existed physically: eg, being given X amount of dollars to buy a cow, but instead taking the money to buy magic beans instead: that would be conversion whether the beans were actually magic and thus of greater or equal value and provided to the original owner or not, because that’s not the specific purpose the owner set out for the money to be used for.
Anyway, one point I want to address is that many posters have argued it couldn’t possibly be theft specifically because there was no intent to permanently deprive. And I could see how you might interpret it that way, and maybe that’s how it would be interpreted. But then again, I vaguely recall a court case (involving the attempted “return” of merchandise that was never actually purchased, just taken off the rack) in which it was noted that while the defendant did in fact intend to return the item to the store and in fact never left the store with it, but merely went from the clothes rack to the checkout counter with the intent of wrongly claiming a refund for “returned” goods, the fact that the defendant took the merchandise with the intent to wrongfully obtain a return amounted to a wrongful taking (because they gained possessions for the purpose of wrongfully obtaining a refund, which amounts to a claim of ownership and thus can intent to permanently deprive) and so were in fact liable for larceny (theft, if you will).
So, applying that example to the OP, we might say that taking the money with an intent to gamble it was in fact a wrongful taking with an intent to permanently deprive, as the subjective intent of the taker was to exercise ownership over the money that he knew was not his. But I also wouldn’t be shocked if there is a specific statutory offense that should apply in some states.
I have my gas bill paid from my account automatically.
If my employer puts $200k in my account and the gas company withdraws $200 from that have I committed a crime? Has the gas company?
Then again, I surely had an extra $200 already to cover the gas bill, but what if the gas company also screws up and they automatically withdraw $200k by mistake. Have either I or the gas company committed a crime?
Intent would factor into it being considered a crime. If you didn’t realize the error and were acting in good faith when withdrawing the money, it’s unlikely to be considered a crime.
I would think regardless of how they damage the car, the borrower would be responsible for it.
I’m reminded of something that happened to me years ago. I wanted to close out a checking account; I literally only had a single check left and was just waiting for the last check I had written to clear so I could go to the bank and use that last check to close out the account. However, when I got the statement confirming that the check had cleared it showed a deposit I had not made. The copy of the deposit slip included with the statement was one of the blank forms with my account number hand-written on it.
So I went to the bank and explained that I wanted to close the account, but there was money in it that I had not deposited. The teller sent me to one of the bank officers, who proceeded to treat me as if I was trying to rob them. The amount involved was only a few hundred, by the way. They finally allowed me to withdraw the amount that I believed should have been in the account, and the next statement showed a debit for the incorrect deposit. I hope the person who filled out the deposit slip incorrectly got his money.
Likewise, I once got paid for several pay periods after I left a job. I informed the company and they gave me a rather prickly reply to return the overpayment IMMEDIATELY (rather than thanking me profusely as I had imagined they would). I think I wrote them a cheque.
Were you paid by direct deposit? I’d have been worried that after I wrote a check to the company somebody else in payroll would have noticed the error and transferred the money back, winding up in you returning the money twice.
They would be. Both morally and legally.
But the OP’s scenario is that the borrower has no ability to pay back the big chunk of money he gambled and lost. If fatcat you loan your Ferrari to your penniless gardener so he can impress his friends and he wraps it around a tree he may well have an obligation to you. But not one he can ever fulfill.
We’re both members of the well-off brigade. It’s easy to forget that a horrifyingly vast percentage of Americans (~60%) cannot come up with $1,000 to meet an unexpected expense. What one can pay often overrules what one ought to pay.
See Most Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense, report finds - CBS News from early 2025. Trigger warning: The page begins with a big vid of the current criminal wannabe-dictator bloviating. It isn’t self-starting at least the way my browser is configured. But the article itself only mentions him in the sense of doing nothing about the problem to date except lip service and actions likely to make the problem worse, not better.
Something seemed off to me in that article so I tried to find the questions. And I found an article on the Bankrate website that has the questions. It doesn’t exactly say that most Americans can’t afford a $1000 surprise expense. The question was
Which of the following best describes how you would deal with a major unexpected expense, such as $1,000 for an emergency room visit or car repair?
and the choices were
Pay the costs from your savings
Finance with a credit card and pay it off over time
Reduce your spending on other things
Borrow from your family or friends
Take out a personal loan
Something else
and people might make some of those choices even if they have $1000 or more in savings for a number of reasons. It’s unlikely that people would borrow from family/friends or take out a personal loan if they had enough in the bank to pay the bill - but it’s not impossible for someone who has enough saved to pay the bill to reduce their spending in order to preserve the savings. Or for someone to decide they will be able to pay $500/mo to the credit cards for two months but are unlikely to return that $500/month to savings.
The Bankrate article says “Forty-one percent of people would pay a major unexpected expense (such as $1,000 for an emergency room visit or car repair.” while the CBS article says "Only 41% of Americans said they would be able to tap their savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to Bankrate’s report. " Forty-one percent would is not the same as forty- one percent would be able to.
Thanks for the research. I noticed some degree of mish-mashing of non-comparable factoids in the article, but didn’t bother to dig deeper.
I’m not broke. I would pay any emergency expense of any size the same way I’d pay any routine expense. Namely charge it to a credit card then pay the balance off in full 30 to 60 days later. So am I part of the people who do or don’t / can or can’t pay a surprise expense from assets?
There are any number of similar reports and articles over the last decade-ish spitting out different but still large numbers. The point remains that a heck of a lot of people have negligible free cash beyond whatever’s left of their last paycheck. And often have zero or negative net worth once their standing debt is included.