Hi all
I have one of those situations that most people just hear about and yet I am bothered with so much.
My bank account grew. I mean by thousands of dollars over night. Of course it’s not mine.
Anyone have similar happenings? What happened?
Thanks,
Odil
Banking clerical errors do happen. Some teller transposed two digits or something. If it’s not fixed by mid-afternoon, I’d report it to my branch.
Either that or it’s your first payment from the Zimbabwe Bank Transfer.
DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT spend the money. Not for a while anyway, or not until you’ve tried to return the money to the bank and been refused several times.
I had a similar experience, though not a banking error: an extra IR£800 (about $1,000) appeared in my account one day. I spent 2 months trying to find out where it came from. The bank told me it was mine. So I spent it. Then my idiotic ex-roommate contacted me to say that she’d accidentally put two months’ rent into my account instead of the landlord’s account. Quite screwed me up repaying her.
Unless of course you’ve inherited the money from a long lost relative.
Shhhh…don’t tell!
When I opened up our business account one form had the wrong account number (2 digits were transposed). That was the number that we used to make deposits. The funny thing was we did it several times intot he wrong account and when we checked the ballance there was a delay but the money did make it int he next day. Then when looking at the statement and a recent deposit (on friday) I noticed we used the wrong account #. I was able to call a still open brance about 50 mi away and told them what had happened. They said that they can’t remove the money but could place a hold on it to prevent it from being withdrawn by the account holder. The next day we were able to go to the local branch and get the money transfered.
I don’t know what his statement said - possibly it had corrections on it.
Yeah, you could always transfer the money to me, I’d look after it for you real well!
Seriously, as far as I’m aware after they’ve put money into your account they can’t take it out without your permission I don’t think, whether its an error or not.
Happened to me once. It stayed in my account for a few days.
Do not spend it.
It will vanish as mysteriously as it came.
This did not seem the case as I posted above. At the very least the bank can freeze it to prevent you from withdrawing it.
If you have ATM you can get a receipt that shows recent deposits. Also if you have an online
account you can find out where it came from I suppose.
I’ve had this happen. They removed it after a few days. If it stays longer, like a month or so, why not put it into a savings account, and get some interest on it? Then, if it turns out to be a jjimm Scenario (sounds like something from Star Trek) you can return it and you’ve made a couple of dollars into the bargain!
My fiance called me from work one day and said “Did we win the lottery?” I said no and asked him why…
Apparently there was an extra $4000 in our account. What had happened is someone had used a card swiper on his card and cloned his card while we were on vacation the week before. They watched him do his PIN and deposited an empty envelope in the machine using our account info. They only managed to get $600, $300 at 11:55pm and $300 at 12:02am. My fiance has a card limit of $300 a day on that account. It saved us a LOT. We only had about $800 in that account at the time.
We had a lot of trouble getting our money back. The bank froze our account because of this deposit, as it was unusual for us to do something like that. So, after a week of signing affidavit’s saying we had nothing to do with it, we got our money back.
Now I know why they say to be careful when you enter your PIN.
It’s from Bill Gates. You must have forwarded that email. 
Seriously, for a great saga about this, check out:
http://www.dnai.com/~pcombs/95c1.html
Sorry, I don’t understand.
If there was $4,000 extra in your account, who put it there?
If a crook got $600, wasn’t that the money you had to get back from the bank?
If you know it isn’t yours, DON’T SPEND IT you could get done for theft. However, I’d second Dylan_73’s idea. If it’s enough to make it worthwhile, pull the money out and deposit it in an interest bearing account in another bank. When the bank eventually sorts out the error and contacts you, you can return all the money but in the meantime, you’ll have made a few bucks to compensate you for the stress caused by the bank’s error.
Do not withdraw the money, whether to spend it or to merely transfer to another account.
Doing so could make you liable for a charge of embezzlement. It does not matter that it is the bank’s mistake. The mistake is likely to be uncovered rather quickly, especially as someone who was supposed to get this money credited to his or her account and didn’t is likely to be asking questions soon. Pointing out that you merely transferred the money and did not spend it would likely be viewed as similar to having stuck up a bank and then saying, in your defense, that you hadn’t spent any of the loot you took.
There was a rather celebrated case in St. Louis a few years back where a local television personality found that her bank account had swollen by more than $100,000 overnight. A clerk had transposed two digits when entering a bank account number, and had credited to her a deposit meant for the account of a large corporation. The woman opened a new account with the money and was charged with embezzlement.
This was actually amusing in a perverse sort of way, as only the night before this hit the news she had been a guest on a local radio talk show, and there had served as a beacon of moral light, denouncing the rampant corruption she saw all around her.
By the way, though the question hasn’t come up, if someone sends a check made payable to your name and it is clearly meant for someone else with your name, endorsing the check is considered forgery.
IANA lawyer, IANAn accountant, and I have no real expertise on which I base my opinion. Nevertheless, I have some contrary advice, which you may take at your own risk:
Don’t say anything to the bank. For one thing, it may not be YOUR bank’s error. The money could have tranferred to your bank from another source with instructions to transfer it into your account, and the error could emanate from that other source (presumably someone else’s bank).
You’ll be safe, and no one will prosecute you, so long as you are ready AT ALL TIMES to return the full amount of the error immediately upon demand. So long as you don’t argue or delay returning it, no bank is going to be siccing a prosecutor on you.
If the money is in an interest bearing account, great, leave it there. Any interest it earns while it sits in the account is yours to keep.
If the money is not in an interest bearing account, move it into one. Make sure there is no withdrawl penalty – remember you will have to surrender it one day. Best to leave it in the same bank as well, so there’ll be no appearance of you “taking” with the possibility of disappearing.
Wait for a letter or phone call. When it comes, and they name the amount, say. “Certainly, I’ll return it. Who do I make out a check to?”
Keep interest earned in meantime. Maybe only a few bucks. but maybe more.
If more than 60 days pass and no one contacts you about it, then consider contacting your bank.
I had this happen once; it’ll probably be gone quite soon. In my case it was my company, which is quite large, had deposited someone else’s paycheck in addition to mine. Someone caught the mistake and it was turned around within a few days. Strange thing was, in a company of tens of thousands of employees, I actually knew the guy whose pay I got. What was distressing was that he was making considerably more money than I was.
In college, we all had accounts at the school’s credit union, which used our social security numbers as account numbers. I had a friend who made a deposit one day and discovered that the teller had accidenally used his account number (9 digits) as the amount of deposit, and he had around $1.6 million in there! I wouldnt have beleived it, but he showed me the statements. It actually stayed there for around 6-8 months before it mysteriously disappeared.
There was never any actual money put into the account. The crooks went to an ATM and made a deposit, telling the machine that $4,000 was in the envelope.
Generally, the bank will assume that the entered information is correct and post the amount. This creates a window for the crook, between the account shows as having $4000 and when the bank realizes the money isn’t there and begins to take action.
Many bank ATMs will now allow you to deposit money and immediately take cash out of the deposit.
I can understand doing this on an account that has little money in it, it creates a balance you can withdraw against. But why would they do this to take $600 from an account that already had $800 in it?