Costly Bank Transfer Errors
According to CNN Money, one German bank clerk somehow managed to have a brief power nap while processing a payment request, and almost ended up transferring €222 million instead of €62.40 by holding down the number 2 on the keyboard – all while nodding off!
The potentially costly error was spotted and rectified by an internal system check before the payment was processed, but NOT before the clerk’s colleague had approved the payment, not paying proper attention to it!
Apparently, that was not the first time a German bank made a mistake that almost led to loss of millions of euros – in 2012, Commerzbank accidentally transferred €200 million, instead of €20,000, into a man’s account – who later gave the money back, but did not return the 12,000 euros generated in interest from having the huge amount of money in his bank account.
And not all similar mistakes end that well for banks – one Dublin man who received a staggering €300,000 instead of 300,000 Spanish pesetas (around €1,200) in 2001, refused to give the money back, saying that he was not prepared to pay for the bank’s error. No information is available on the outcome.
Coming back closer to home, all of us have probably heard the story of the runaway millionaires from Rotorua, who fled New Zealand after mistakenly receiving $10 million dollars in their bank account (instead of $10,000) – out of which $4 million was recovered straight away, and $2.9 million – later. They were arrested nearly two and a half years later.
Not only is it illegal to keep mistakenly transferred money, it is also unethical – and often it’s not just the banks that suffer from such errors. One lady from the UK lost two years’ pay – £26,000 – after mistyping one digit during the initial online transaction, when she had set up the regular transfer of her pay into her partner’s account. Now she is unable to get the cash back, as the wrong person on the receiving end has spent the hard earned money.
I think the lesson here is to always, always double and, possibly, triple check the amount you are about to pay into someone’s account and also their bank account number – in order to avoid similar blunders.
Here at Payday Advance, we use direct debits as the method of cash loan NZ repayment – so you can avoid the need to set up bank transfers and the possible costly mistakes that sometimes come with them.