Did this person commit a crime?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Interesting question. I looked into it, and here in the UK the knowledge of the receiver does make a difference.

If you know you have been given surplus funds by mistake, and you spend some of it, even temporarily, then you’ve committed a crime under the Theft Act 1968 24A.
Generally it’s hard to prove knowledge of course, and I am struggling to find examples of a conviction. I guess it would need someone to send an email or something to their partner saying “My employer has given me 10x salary by mistake, time to get spending!”

62

An indication of knowledge would be sudden changes in spending patterns. If someone’s balance is typically ~$1000, their spending should reflect that. If their balance mistakenly goes up to $100k and they’re blowing through the money as fast as they can buying cars, jewelry, and other expensive items, then it’s obvious that they knew about mistake.

63

No, that would just be evidence they knew they had significantly more money, but they might just “guess” it was a legal transaction.

For example, here is a case of a man that received £193,000 by mistake. He claims he guessed it was an inheritance payment, and used some of the money to pay off credit card debts.
He did ultimately pay back the full amount, but he wasn’t convicted of anything.

64

That’s when evidence would be needed for a judge to make a decision. If a rich relative recently died, then saying you thought it was an inheritance deposit would be reasonable. That was the situation in that case:

But if you didn’t know of any relatives who recently died or couldn’t introduce any evidence that an inheritance was coming your way, a judge wouldn’t just accept that excuse. But there is a lot of leeway here. Like with the person in the OP, it’s not unreasonable for his company to get that kind of deposit as a normal part of business. If a normal person got $200k deposited into their checking account, it would be very unusual in most cases. But a contracting company may have deposits at that level and higher. So even in his case, he could have explained it away as he thought it was a normal deposit and the judge may see that as reasonable.

65

From the article

I didn’t want someone else’s money in my account and I was worried about spending the money so I transferred £150,000 of it into premium bonds.

This at least is blatantly false due to the £50000 limit. Other points of the article indicate that Barclays dispute his actions during their first contact call.

66

Ok good catch, but it seems likely both that he spent at least some of the money and that he wasn’t prosecuted.

I dont think the guardian would be doing a follow up story and talking to both the bank and the man that received the money and not have it come up that he got a criminal conviction.

67

Since it’s IMHO, a minor digression. As a former insurance adjuster, that situation could get extremely interesting, though not in a fun matter. If I borrow your car with permission, and take it racing (without your knowledge), it’s all fine on the surface… but in many/most states, your insurance DOESN’T cover events off road (sometimes as little as 50 feet), and frequently exclude coverage on racetracks/races. So friend/borrower takes the car, goes racing without your knowledge, and damages it.

Insurance gets involved, and first, the borrower should go to his carrier (presuming he has COLL coverage). Said carrier says, nope, excluded coverage on your policy, we won’t pay. Lender now has to go to his carrier, and carrier says, Nope, we do cover a permissive driver (only direct) but they’re subject to your same policy limits, and we too don’t carry race track exposure.

Lender can now try to clarify and say “I gave permission for him to take it too work, NOT to the track” and the carrier would likely say - "In that case, we can try to make a claim against him, but you need to go to the Police and swear out a vehicle theft complaint against them. Once that’s done and they find in your favor, we’ll pay out as a COMP (non-collision) claim, after your deductible, and then subrogate against your friend.

So yeah, eventually, the borrower may end up with vehicle theft on his record (a crime) and be paying entirely out of their own pocket PLUS any recovery expenses involved from your carrier’s efforts to subrogate.

And if you want to make it extra special double good complicated, what if the borrower hit something at the track or FSM forbit, someone.

Sorry for the minor digression, just an interesting side note to the degrees of criminality that may apply (it varies from state to state, carrier to carrier as well).

68

I’m not disputing your expertise.

You’re saying the borrower’s misuse of the vehicle outside the lender’s intent constitutes criminal theft, not some lesser civil tort? And you’re saying the lender’s insurance carrier would stand pat = not pay anything until / unless the theft complaint comes to trial and the borrower is found guilty (or pleads guilty)?

Wow. That is a much higher hurdle than I expected. It also means the government’s discretion on whether to prosecute or not a rather minor crime from their POV has an absolute veto on the lender’s recovery chances. Seems … unfair.

69

It might not be that the thief must actually be convicted - it’s often the case that insurance wont pay unless the victim files a police report and agrees to cooperate with any prosecution. It avoids the situation where I know who the culprit is, I don’t want them arrested but I do want my insurance to pay. Also happens with credit card and other frauds.

Because I can’t have it both ways - get the insurance to pay or the credit card charges removed from my account and not have my son ( the culprit) arrested.

70

@LSLGuy - I’m not saying the situation is common, but using it to illustrate how we have (in the OP) a situation that people may or may not define as technical theft, but may or may not be a crime. The example I quoted was, at heart another “victimless” crime, or, if the OP’s crazy scenario had worked, a crime with little or no financial loss in the end.

My little diversion was that it easily slips out of that “no financial loss” - and even if it isn’t theft, it may be a crime.

To clear up my specific example - it’s really not so much about putting it in the hands of government, but in tying the lenders hands so everyone has to sink together. Leaving out any ethics of insurance for the moment, both the borrower’s and lender’s insurance is on solid ground - they have no contractual obligation to pay at all - the use wasn’t covered (in most states and policies, not all).

In my scenario, the lender is now in a situation where they’re potentially out 10k in repairs (I’m making a nice round number, and keeping it on the lower side since it’s still driveable). As came up in our roll-over equity thread, he may NOT have 10k available, or isn’t willing to do it himself, and the borrower is likely in the same boat. So the lender really wants his insurance to pay even if they don’t have to.

So, he changes the story to the insurance to say the actual use was outside the permission. Well, NOW we’re talking about a crime, be it “theft” or otherwise. The lender doesn’t care, he wants the damages covered, and doesn’t want to have to try to force the borrower to pay, because he’d need a lawyer et al, and it would be a tough road to prove: “How did he get your key in the first place? Oh well, uh, I guess…”

Of course, if the insurance pays out with no qualms, good luck on getting the borrower’s coverage or the borrower to pay, especially if the lender doesn’t agree. So the lender’s carrier is covering their asses - it’s one thing to lie to your insurance (not a good thing) but another to lie to the cops. Thus filling out the theft report. And what the carrier hopes at this point is that faced with having to testify, or be found making a false statement to the police, the two parties responsible will work it out between themselves. IE go away and stop costing them money.

Bringing us full circle to the OP - if the bank was able to fully recover their money, it’s most likely in their interests to NOT make a big fuss over things, because it’ll cost them money to prosecute, the difficulty of proving damages, and a metric ton of bad PR. But was there a crime committed? Depends on how defined and the jurisdiction.

71

Thanks for the more detailed explanation. Yeah, it gets tricky when all the parties are trying to leave somebody else holding the bag.

At one time I ran a (unregulated) consumer business that had sorta similar exposure to people buying our services then claiming the purchase was unauthorized so they shouldn’t have to pay. Of course, being a service, there was nothing for us to repossess or even ask them to return for a refund.

Our solution was that if they’d send us a copy of the local police report they had filed asserting someone had somehow gotten their account credentials and made the unauthorized purchase, then we’d refund their money. Otherwise not.

I’m sure at least once we ended up not refunding somebody who had been legitimately victimized; typically by a roommate or houseguest. But it was amazing how many of the unauthorized purchase complaints simply evaporated when they were asked to swear to the cops about what had happened at their house.

Moral hazard is everywhere. If there’s a way to get somebody else to pay for your mistakes lotsa, lotsa folks will happily glom onto that.

72

So, I looked up what some of the crimes are called in my area, and it turns out that (1) Legal firms are publishing on their web sites AI slop with obvious errors, and (2), there is a ‘theft’ crime defined in my state, because the courts “deem” that using money without permission is appropriation – taking ownership of the money – even when it is, or is intended to be, temporary.

There is also a “theft” crime where appropriation is “failure to return”, similar to “theft by finding”. If you wake up one morning, and find that someone has placed a new septic tank on your front lawn (because you don’t have a clearly marked property number), they haven’t “lent” it to you, or “delivered” it to you. You have possession, but it is so clearly a mistake that you don’t have “ownership” of the item unless you decide to steal it. This is a little complex, because if someone lends you 1000 instead of 100, that’s creates a debt, not theft. Because of the AI slop mentioned above, I haven’t entirely figured this one out.

73

Funny, wiki may be the last man standing for legit info on the web. As long as they’re zealous to prevent contributors from using slop.

My example has turned into a bit of a hijack but the main question has been well-answered by now, so here goes …

Logically, there’s always some threshold beyond which misuse becomes a flavor of theft. Rent a car from Avis for a week but keep it an extra day without calling to tell them. Theft? Probably not. An extra year? Probably.

That whole area seems ideally suited for contract terms and precedential law and utterly unsuited for code law. When dealing with person to person verbal “contracts” = “Hey Bob, can I borrow your car today? Mine won’t start. Sure.” there are no clear terms to rely on for the boundaries of legit and illegit use of the car. If it does get to court, the judge is going to be working from precedent and reasonable man standards and little else to construct a ruling.