I’d just sit back and live my life as normal, secure in the knowledge that, until the bank catches on, none of my normal checks will bounce. And firm in the knowledge that they’ll catch on in a few days and send me a nice note, but would not let me keep for my trouble the thousands of dollars of interest it earned. The bastards.
I just looked and the “President Select High Yield Checking” from a nearby bank earns the whopping (drum roll) 0.10% APY. So the $100M would earn you $274 per day.
The USA for one, ask a guy named Calderhart:
It seems a local time honored corruption in politics tradition to make sure you have a secondary (or third) citizenship to flee to.
He has yet to return and lives openly.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/I_LL__BE__BACK-199463861.html
Ain’t no one extraditing to Trinidad.
And someone might, out of the goodness of their heart, see fit to gift you a platter of cookies with no explanation. If you think that’s what’s happened and you eat the cookies, it’s a small matter to make restitution. The rest of this explanation is left as an exercise for the student.
Places that badly managed often loose a lot of money to employee theft. That doesn’t make it any less annoying though: I quite the Bank after they made a (much smaller) mistake like that.
And I was glad when the Bank finally folded due to making the same kind of mistakes on a grand scale that they were making on a small scale with retail customers like me. The world is a better place without badly run banks.
Until the bank realizes something’s screwed up and freezes your account to keep you from using any of the money. My first reaction would be to withdraw most of what I think of as my money and deposit it in another banking, leaving $100 million and change in the original bank, and let them figure it all out.
Looks like somebody hit the high score on Asteroids.
I’d say to the bank, look, you gave me this money by accident. How much are you going to pay me for having this in my account? After all, it could affect my benefits/tax (and it actually would). Due to my honesty in alerting you to this error, credit me with any interest accrued plus allot me a sum for my troubles, that sum to be decided by our lawyers.
I wouldn’t try to withdraw the money and skip the country because that would fail.
$100 million?!? Where did the rest of my money go?
Going to the media might be sort of a, “you might not want to trust this bank, people” kind of thing. Well, that and trying to cover his ass, in case anyone wants to accuse him of taking it. “See, I publically stated it wasn’t mine!”
I had a $24,000.00 hiccup deposit into my account once. I didn’t even know about it until the bank called me (shortly after it happened I guess). They explained there was an error, and that due to the sum amount it would take a couple of days to disappear again, so don’t overspend in my account!
I logged in, saw the money, got a chuckle, and it disappeared on its own like they said it would.
Honest question: does a person actually have any legal standing to do any of what you recommend? It seems counter to my layperson’s understanding of the law and taxes.
Something similar happened to me about 20 yrs ago.
I went to the ATM and to withdraw some cash. The ATM flashed up a balance of $162,xxx. Well, my balance could have 16xx dollar so I thought I just read the balance wrong.
Turns out the School’s system payroll had been deposited into my account.
I actually saw something kind of similar on a client’s bank statement once. $23.5 million deposited and withdrawn in the same day, with a memo on those lines that must have been some kind of internal error code. It was partly funny because the client hadn’t even noticed the transaction, which tells you how much attention most people pay to their business activity.
Anyway, I would caution against trying to keep any of the money for yourself unless you have a top-notch lawyer who’s telling you otherwise.