Years ago, my first assignment in the USAF was at Ramstein AB in Germany (92-94). We could pull german money out of the Credit Union’s ATM there. One day, we noticed the exchange rate at the ATM was about 4 times what it normally was. Naturally, young dumb kids that we were, withdrew every available bit of cash we could in order to get 4X the marks. Bank error in our favor, collect money!
Eventually, the credit union realized their mistake, and since we all had our direct deposit accounts there, they just took the difference between the correct exchange rate and the rate we got that day right out of our accounts
This was mentioned here in the SDMB a couple months ago:
A “bank error” resulted in a couple getting an extra $120,000 credited to their account. (A real deposit was credited to the wrong account.) The couple withdrew the money and spent it, and are now facing felony theft charges.
The bank made an error. The error was in *your *favor. This means the bank mistakenly gave you money. The card says the bank error was in your favor, as indeed it was.
The bank made an error. The error was in *their *favor, not yours. Then later, they discovered the error, and repaid the money they had unjustly taken from you. This means the bank is simply repaying the money they took from you. But we are asked to believe that since the Monopoly people couldn’t fit this more elaborate narrative on the card, they decided to instead state that the bank made an error in *your *favor, even though the error was in the *bank’s *favor, and the only thing in your favor was a correction, not an error.
Some evidence against the second interpretation:
It’s more complicated. Occam’s razor favors the first interpretation.
It requires us to ignore what the card says in favor of a narrative that directly contradicts it.
It involves two separate events, an error and a correction. We are to believe that the second event results in $200 winding up in front of the player, but the first event is not reflected in any movement of colorful paper. It exists outside the world of the game. The card doesn’t instruct the banker to take $200 from the player and then give it back in a few rounds, to match the events proposed by the second interpretation. It instructs the banker to just hand over $200. Why would one event but not the other result in colorful paper changing hands?
The player depicted on the card looks shocked and surprised. That is not the face of a player who just spent 90 minutes on the phone demanding that the bank give back the $200 they mistakenly took. Or the face of a person contemplating the 120 minutes, three emails, and a letter to the state’s banking authorities it’ll take before the bank refunds the overdraft and bounced check fees they applied to the account that was only overdrawn because of their error. That illustration clearly shows the shock of someone receiving unearned and unexpected money.
The conclusion is clear. The bank has mistakenly given the player $200. I hope everyone who’s drawn such a card and thought they were actually entitled to the $200 feels appropriately guilty now.
We played Monopoly on Xmas Eve afternoon. Unfortunately, we paused the game for dinner & never went back to it because I was the banker & cheating up a storm. Most of the time when someone wanted/needed change, the $100 or $500 ended up in my stack instead of back in the bank…& no one caught on. Like I said, we didn’t play long enough to really pay off, though.
