HI evaryone!
Thanks for all the replies, I think I am too scared to even think about touching the money, even to transfer it to another account.
As of this morning, it’s still there in all it’s tempting 0’s.
Odil
And how much interest did he get paid on it?
(even at 2% a year, I make it over $16,000.)
I think it is far more likely that he printed the statements to fool you.
obfusciatrist,
thanks for the explanation.
How do you think banks defend against someone setting up a company, regularly paying in a monthly sum, then one month having no money in the envelope and withdrawing most of it (before fleeing)?
slipster,
are you a lawyer?
It sounds eminently sensible to me to put a possible mistaken deposit in a separate place so it can be repaid immediately.
What if your account is a joint one, and the other person (mistakenly or otherwise) withdraws it?
What if swindlers nick it?
OK, perhaps the above are unlikely - but I can’t see criminal intent behind storing it safely.
I am not a lawyer, but I’d move it to an interest-bearing account and notify the bank it was an unexpected deposit.
Many years ago, the monthly statement for by Merrill Lynch accounts briefly showed a huge deposit, but they withdrew the extra money a few days later. I was never notified about either action, except afterwards in the statement. In addition, they withdrew the full amount of extra interest this extra money had earned. Unfortunately, they did the “interest reduction” step twice, so even after trying to clear things up I ended up losing about 20 dollars.
If I were you, I would leave the money untouched and notify the bank immediately. It’s a long shot, but it is possible that this is some sort of criminal activity, and they are parking the money in your account. In that case, you want to remove any doubt that you were cooperating with the scheme. In any event, the bank is virtually certain to eventually notice the problem – they have ongoing internal audits looking for this kind of thing – and will remove the money and any interest it earned, for the simple reason that it never belonged to you. The sooner they fix the problem the better for you.
Of course, if you receive a statement that looks like this from your bank, the money’s as good as yours.
This happened to me, to the tune of an extra $11,000. At one point in this long process, I was about $10,000 overdrawn. Imagine my surprise.
According to the bank, they would have caught their mistakes at the end of the month, even if I didn’t report them.
Unfortunately, good camper that I am, I reported the problem immediately, which screwed them up. I went in to the bank several times, with complete documentation. (Luckily, I guessed their first mistake wouldn’t be their last.)
Keep a record of every conversation and transaction you have with the bank for at least a couple months. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Banks don’t keep sufficient records to disentangle difficult problems. Trust me on this.
Of course, you’d be out of your mind to spend any of the money.
If you can, don’t access the account at all. Open another account in another bank. Do as much of your business as you can from there.
Banks are not dishonest, but they have absolutely awful procedures for fixing their own errors. This was a nightmare for me which I was beginning to be afraid (even given the helpful attitude of the bank in question) would never be resolved.
Protect yourself.
LOL Thanks for all the entertaining posts! Well as of now, the money has disapeared, just as quickly as it got there.
Now I have a story to tell one day…
“I was rich for almost 2 days…”
sigh
Odil
I had this happen to me several years ago. The bank deposited an extra $3000 in my account, and of course my immediate reaction was to withdraw it and deposit it in an interst-bearing account, in another bank nearby. Walking across the street with $3000 cash in my pocket was a very eerie feeling. 
Three days later, I got a TELEGRAM from the bank, demanding I contact them immediately. I had never gotten a telegram before. They grilled me pretty good about what I thought I was doing, and since I kinda expected this to happen sooner or later (although my youthful naivete had me thinking that they might not even notice) I already had a cover story – I told them that I assumed my father had deposited the money, but it was in the wrong account, so I moved it to the proper one. They then told me that as long as I was TOTALLY UNAWARE that the money wasn’t mine, I was innocent, but I still had to return the money right away (which I did.)
That’s probably the most important thing. If I had told them I knew it wasn’t my money, I’d have been in jail, lickety split.
Oh yeah, when I did return the money, EVERYONE knew my name. They actually treated me quite nicely, and seemed happy to resolve the problem with just a minimal fuss. Plus I got about 15 bucks or so in interest from the second bank.
I don’t know, it may just be considered a risk of doing business. The fraud losses suffered by banks can be surprisingly high (not in percentages - it is generally a drop in the bucket, overall), but in absolute numbers.
I’ll try to find out on Monday when I get back to work. I work at a bank, but not in a division at all related to retail or small business banking.
Many years ago I was changing banks and had a problem with an incorrect deposit. I was waiting for the last check I had written to clear so I could close out my checking account. When I got the statement which listed my last check there was also a deposit which I knew I hadn’t made. This was back in the days when banks returned your checks and deposit slips; the deposit slip included was one of the ones from the lobby, with my account number hand-written on it. I went down to the bank and explained that I wanted to close the account, but there was money in it that wasn’t mine.
OOPS
lost part of that when I had to re-post.
Anyway, when I tried to close out the account, you’d have thought I’d pulled out a gun and demanded that they empty the vault and let me take the president’s daughter as a hostage. I had to spend an hour talking to two different people. They photocopied the deposit slip and made me sign a statement that I had not made the deposit, then weren’t going to let me cash a check for the correct balance in case that money wasn’t mine either.
Then for six months they sent me statements informing me that my account was overdrawn by $0.50 - the monthly service charge for the final month the account was open. Finally, having spent three times that much in postage, they credited my account and closed it.
BTW, the amount of the extra deposit was slightly over two hundred dollars.
Fellow named Patrick Combs had an interesting strategy for dealing with this sort of issue … Of course, in his case, it was nearly $100,000, which makes for a much better story. Especially when the money was withdrawn as a cashier’s check and locked in a security deposit box in that same bank … 