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

Attended a training course in the late 90s for which I booked hotels for myself and a colleague. Paid via credit card on one of the old carbon paper machines, and claimed the expenses from my employer as normal. However, the charge from the hotel never appeared on my credit card bill. Called the hotel and they said they had a record of me paying so nothing to worry about. Kept that ~£500 aside for 3 years in case it ever showed up on my statement, but it never did.
 
For banking - last year my car finance company made a howler with my direct debit. Always gets taken on the 7th of the month from my secondary bank account, which it did. On the 17th, they took it again but I only ever kept enough in there for that payment, so it took me overdrawn. Got in touch with the bank who reversed the direct debit immediately to take the balance back to 0. Called the finance company who couldn't figure how or why this happened but they reverse it at their end as well, leaving me £127 up. Also got £50 for the inconvenience.

Years ago I collected on a shocking error from Ladbrokes. There was a tennis game being played which was a set and 5-2 to a chap called Denis Kudla, who was a pretty big server. They were offering 1000/1 for him to hold his serve, when it should have been 1/10. Stuck £1 fully expecting the bet to get rejected but it wasn't. He held serve and £1,001 landed in my account. I knew damn well they'd take this back, so I hopped in the car into town and withdrew it in cash over the counter before they could reverse it. Banked it and got an email 4 hours later saying they made a mistake and it took my betting account to -£976, if I didn't pay it back they'd sue me. Told them to try it and never heard a word from them again. A week later they set the balance back to 0 and I closed the account :D
 
el_dazza said:
Years ago I collected on a shocking error from Ladbrokes. There was a tennis game being played which was a set and 5-2 to a chap called Denis Kudla, who was a pretty big server. They were offering 1000/1 for him to hold his serve, when it should have been 1/10. Stuck £1 fully expecting the bet to get rejected but it wasn't. He held serve and £1,001 landed in my account. I knew damn well they'd take this back, so I hopped in the car into town and withdrew it in cash over the counter before they could reverse it. Banked it and got an email 4 hours later saying they made a mistake and it took my betting account to -£976, if I didn't pay it back they'd sue me. Told them to try it and never heard a word from them again. A week later they set the balance back to 0 and I closed the account :D
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Delicious. Good work.
 
Got a sofa delivered (yes it's a corner soda) still haven't been charged £700.

Amazon gave me a £125 gift refund and I've no idea why, so I spent it lol.

Purchased two laptops for the kids and for some strange reason they where refunded to PayPal about a year after being delivered.
 
Went out for a meal at pizza express, their card machine was broken and I had no cash to pay and no card machine near by. They wrote my credit card details down (I had no other option...) so they could do a cardholder not present transaction later. I assume in the moment they must have wrote my card details down wrong as I never got charged
 
lookitsjonno said:
Went out for a meal at pizza express, their card machine was broken and I had no cash to pay and no card machine near by. They wrote my credit card details down (I had no other option...) so they could do a cardholder not present transaction later. I assume in the moment they must have wrote my card details down wrong as I never got charged
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Wait you let them do this? lol.

They definitely shouldn't be writing card numbers down! I'd have asked them to call me when it was working, I've done card numbers over the phone but they shouldn't be jotting them down on paper for later.

Admittedly this is trusting them not to do so as they're speaking to you on the phone lol.
 
I had a deposit made to my account about 20 years ago for £89k.
I was getting my first mortgage at the time for the same amount so thought it was that, not knowing how they worked when it came to the exchange of monies.
Only found out as I checked my balance at a am ATM and thought it was odd.

Turns out it was an error, some company had paid a bill to me rather than where it was supposed to go and it was all taken back after the weekend
Got 3 days interest in it but nothing else.
I asked someone at work that used to work on a bank and if I had done anything with it, it would be fraud as I knew it wasn't my money and a mistake.

Still have the statement. It would be £147,000 now
 
HungryHippos said:
Wait you let them do this? lol.

They definitely shouldn't be writing card numbers down! I'd have asked them to call me when it was working, I've done card numbers over the phone but they shouldn't be jotting them down on paper for later.

Admittedly this is trusting them not to do so as they're speaking to you on the phone lol.
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I had had a few Peroni's and I wanted to get out of the place but I did question the same thing afterwards lol
 
When buying our house last year, once our offer was accepted the estate agent sent our receipt/notice thing, and she had swapped 2 figures round in our favour. Meant the seller had accepted £2,700 less than what we offered (which was every single penny we had!).

I called the agent rather than leave a paper trail, to check if this typo was on her doc or the original offer. She checked up and called back with a "Yep, that's the figure I showed them so you're safe ;) "

I've also got a bass amp that turned up when the first one was dead on arrival. They cross-shipped a replacement immediately, then 3 months later I got an email saying "We've checked the amp you returned and it's dead, so we'll ship you a replacement". My client has the one he ordered, I've still got this duplicate in a box since 2012 :D
 
LuckyBenski said:
When buying our house last year, once our offer was accepted the estate agent sent our receipt/notice thing, and she had swapped 2 figures round in our favour. Meant the seller had accepted £2,700 less than what we offered (which was every single penny we had!).

I called the agent rather than leave a paper trail, to check if this typo was on her doc or the original offer. She checked up and called back with a "Yep, that's the figure I showed them so you're safe ;) "

I've also got a bass amp that turned up when the first one was dead on arrival. They cross-shipped a replacement immediately, then 3 months later I got an email saying "We've checked the amp you returned and it's dead, so we'll ship you a replacement". My client has the one he ordered, I've still got this duplicate in a box since 2012 :D
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Lucky Benski indeed! accidental low-ball offer! :)
 
mid 90's, I bought a tshirt from viz festooned with a cartoon Danny Baker holding a microphone and a packet of daz with the tagline 'Danny Baker is a ****'. due to multiple oversights they sent me 3 by mistake then a month later another 3 turned up in the post. We wore them for our 5 a side team.

I heard later viz were quite famous for doing this sort of stuff so maybe it was deliberate.
 
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I recently bought some slippers from Asda / George. A couple of days later they went on sale. So I bought them again and just let the initial purchase and delivery sit at the store until it got returned and refunded. They refunded both purchases. Unsure if this is a bug in their software and would happen again. Free slippers. Woohoo!

When I was a doley scumbag scrounger happily living and getting drunk off all your hard earned taxes, I had to do course run by a private employment company. They gave me an envelope stuffed with cash (about £300) if I agreed to sign off when I'd secured an interview. I never got the job and carried on signing on. They never mentioned the money - was totally illegal. They were obviously on targets with financial rewards to get as many of us off the dole as possible.
 
On several occasions when I've asked to return something with Amazon they have issued a "returnless refund" so I got to keep the item and got a refund. Recently this was the case for a Corsair RM850x PSU and a while back a Razer Huntsman keyboard so in total I've had over £200 of freebies.
 
HungryHippos said:
Wait you let them do this? lol.

They definitely shouldn't be writing card numbers down! I'd have asked them to call me when it was working, I've done card numbers over the phone but they shouldn't be jotting them down on paper for later.

Admittedly this is trusting them not to do so as they're speaking to you on the phone lol.
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My Dad had this a few years ago. Pub's card reader went down. It's in a small village, so no ATM. They rang him back 2 days later to do payment over the phone.
 
LiE said:
On several occasions when I've asked to return something with Amazon they have issued a "returnless refund" so I got to keep the item and got a refund. Recently this was the case for a Corsair RM850x PSU and a while back a Razer Huntsman keyboard so in total I've had over £200 of freebies.
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Yeah Amazon is pretty liberal with refunds. On a much lesser extent I ordered some fischer sink fasteners (£8?) and when I tried to return them, they refunded and let me keep them.

I've also had some Echo Buds refunded and they let me keep them.

And I have had 2 or 3 Hue bulbs go wrong in quick succession and they've refunded the full package (£55 EchoDot+Bulb) and 2 twin packs of Hue Bulbs (2x £16).
 
A few years ago, Mum bought a pack of food storage containers from Lakeland Limited. Noticed that one lid was missing. Quick phone call to their customer services and they sent her another pack of 10 pots for free.

Some companies just send out the missing part.
 
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