Bank error in your favour, collect £... ?

Feek

Feek

Feek

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Inspired by a conversation elsewhere, have you ever been the beneficiary of an error, or an event at a financial institution that left you with a profit?

I can start by going back to 1991. I had a BCCI credit card and I'd made a couple of large purchases in the month prior to them collapsing. I did receive a letter telling me that someone would be in touch for me to pay my balance but nobody ever did. Because it was such a large figure, I remember exactly how my much it was at the time. £4,767.25

I had the money and I kept it in a separate account for a few months but eventually decided that if they didn't want it, I'd keep it.

In 2018, I woke up one morning and there was a deposit of £1,904 in my Paypal account that I knew nothing about. I made every possible attempt I could to trace it with no success, even PayPal couldn't tell me anything about it (I posted a thread about it here. Two weeks later it vanished with literally no trace of it ever being there so I wasn't so lucky then.

Has anyone else had anything similar? Bank error, random deposit?
 
I bought my wife an expensive bag for her birthday, approx. 300 quid. I track my finances to the penny and enter every transaction, no matter what. I accrued the expense as normal as I was used to AMEX taking a while to register. I accrued it for 5 months before I gave up and released it into my everyday spending account.

I also raised an incident with AMEX because the Hilton Manchester had charged me 120 quid and I was no where near. About 5 months later I realised I had indeed booked a night there, mistaking it for East Mids Hilton; and then totally forgot I had intended to go to the East Mids. Made my brain ache unpicking that.
 
When I was unemployed for a spell around 2006 I was overpaid benefits - they went to the ends of the earth to chase up £13 or £18 or whatever it was the computer told them I owed - were absolutely uninterested that it was actually hundreds of pounds - even after escalating it they just acted like I was trying to get out of repaying the £13 or whatever and were insistent the system was correct. The worrying thing for me is there might be people on the other side of that who've been told erroneously they owe 100s or 1000s and run into the same kind of response.

My sister had 1.6 million incorrectly deposited into her account when she was a kid - that got moved back out pretty swiftly.
 
When I was a poor teenager going to the indy club a freind of mine when to take a tenner out from the cashpoint (was enough back then lol) he saw his balance was on £20000 and something... Instantly took out 100 quid and he/we had the most intoxicated night of our little lives...

Saturday morning it had gone and he was 100 quid overdrawn and had to beg dad to help him lol.

Late 90s... ? Green jelly, little pig springs to mind. Holy crap that was early 1990s how old am I getting?
 
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I left a job and they accidentally paid me an extra month. I got a letter asking for it back, but they never followed up.

It turned out the accounts guy was robbing them blind(former colleague told me), and also not doing his job properly.

I think my overpayment got lost in the xxxx storm.
 
potatolord said:
I left a job and they accidentally paid me an extra month. I got a letter asking for it back, but they never followed up.

It turned out the accounts guy was robbing them blind(former colleague told me), and also not doing his job properly.

I think my overpayment got lost in the xxxx storm.
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Same thing happened where my dad works - was in the local news due to the mess it made with people "not realising" they'd been overpaid and putting themselves in a bad financial position when it came to how they were going to resolve it.
 
I doubt I would have gotten away with this if I had exploited it, but I had a £140k mortgage taken out against someone elses flat rather than my own due to a typo in the paperwork.
 
Not really the same but it’s the best I’ve got.

In 2008 I was involved in “onboarding” 60bn of credit products into managed funds. There was only about 20 of us in total. Many things had to be mark to model because there was no real market (outside of the TARP schemes). So well what this meant was the credit analysts had to work out the values of bonds basically. One analyst came up the one of the fund managers when I just happened to be sitting next to them and they were really worried at the reaction they would get to showing a 40cent in the dollar valuation, when he looked at the spreadsheet he just very calmly said, “it’s not 40c it’s 4 ffs”. Bank error in nobodies favour in that instance.

In my game that’s a war story :D
 
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I've had the opposite. Natwest "lost" my ISA when it was transferred to them even though they were in control using a switching service (before the guarantee).

To apologise for the issue, they then sent me the details from someone else's account and every scrap of paper from that file which had nothing to do with me.

I was offered £50 and the branch manager was promoted to area manager.
 
Oh, and I once had £2.5 million in blank girocheques delivered to me in error (a big box full!). No-one even asked me to sign for them.

I had visions of years in jail, so handed it in immediately.

My mates never let me live that down for years.
 
A couple of years after buying our first house we got a letter through from the mortgage company explaining that they had made some kind of omission in the terms of the mortgage which meant that they had to refund us all of the interest we had paid to date. It went against the balance so can’t remember the amount involved now as we never actually saw the money.
 
About 8 years ago I had a manager who was really annoyed when I handed my notice in (3 months) and I had enough holiday to book the whole last month off. He was an arse about it and rejected my holiday but I took it anyway after saying all my goodbyes.

Because the idiot had cancelled my holiday it meant that when I got paid they added in all my unused leave, so I basically got a months worth of wages for nothing. :D

He also tried to cancel my phone number, but I'd already been kindly given the PAC code by HR and ported out to my own tariff as it was allowed which made him even more livid when I told him to stop hassling me on my personal number. The weird thing is, after I'd left he was all pally pally whenever I went to other ex colleagues leaving drinks (it was a big company) - I think because he wanted a job at the place I'd left for and it was just jealousy in the first place that caused him to turn.
 
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Em3bbs said:
The weird thing is, after I'd left he was all pally pally whenever I went to other ex colleagues leaving drinks (it was a big company) - I think because he wanted a job at the place I'd left for and it was just jealousy in the first place that caused him to turn.
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Some people just don't like that they might be seen, or that they might feel, as the bad/unreasonable person and will act all pally, especially if it is a situation not on their terms, to try and make out like it is you that is the one in the wrong. Generally those people are snakes and not to be trusted.
 
Feek said:
Inspired by a conversation elsewhere, have you ever been the beneficiary of an error, or an event at a financial institution that left you with a profit?

I can start by going back to 1991. I had a BCCI credit card and I'd made a couple of large purchases in the month prior to them collapsing. I did receive a letter telling me that someone would be in touch for me to pay my balance but nobody ever did. Because it was such a large figure, I remember exactly how my much it was at the time. £4,767.25

I had the money and I kept it in a separate account for a few months but eventually decided that if they didn't want it, I'd keep it.

In 2018, I woke up one morning and there was a deposit of £1,904 in my Paypal account that I knew nothing about. I made every possible attempt I could to trace it with no success, even PayPal couldn't tell me anything about it (I posted a thread about it here. Two weeks later it vanished with literally no trace of it ever being there so I wasn't so lucky then.

Has anyone else had anything similar? Bank error, random deposit?
Click to expand...

So you're the reason they were shut down!
 
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