Posted on 10/09/2011 5:18:17 PM PDT by Marie
My daughter is a full-time college student working part-time (minimum wage) for a large, national corporation.
Last week, she went to her bank kiosk to deposit her check. The check was supposed to be for just over $300.
The computer changed the amount to more than $1,098,000.
She came straight home and reported the error to the bank. They said that it would take 24 hours to fix it.
Apparently, the 'fix' was to drop the $1,000,000 and just give her the $98,000 and change.
Her company honored the check and deposited that amount.
She's really frustrated. It's been four days. Does she keep working through the bank or should she contact her corporate headquarters to fix this error? She's also terrified of anything happening to the money while it's in her care and was wondering if she could move it to her savings account for safe-keeping. (Her savings is connected to her checking. This would just protect the money if someone got a hold of her blank checks or her card.) She's worried that such a move could be interpreted as an attempt at theft.
Has anyone here dealt with such a thing before? She's not an idiot and she is well aware that the money isn't hers, that the error will be caught and the money returned eventually, but she wants this taken care of as fast as possible.
One last issue. Banks report large deposits to the IRS. Is this going to bite her in the butt come tax time?
I can only tell you from experience, working at a bank for many years, that you don't even want to open the door to suspicion in these cases. As is, they will eventually just make an account correction. If she moves the money, she opens the door to all kinds of complications and problems.
While not a legal expert on the matter, this sort of thing is not uncommon because I've seen it as a drive through teller all the way through commercial lender. At least when I used to work in the industry, large deposits were accidentally made into wrong accounts all the time, and never, ever have I heard of a case of the bank or some company eating the loss. Normally the error is discovered quickly and the account will be debited the funds. If the money is no longer there, bank security gets involved. If it is a large amount of money, law enforcement gets tangled up in it. The ones that I recall taking a long time to clear up were international wire transfers.
If she notified the bank, has records of it, does not spend the money and can produce it on demand, it is very possible she would be in the clear. I would not be so sure of that though and it opens the door to suspicion and wrongful, time consuming investigations. You never want to even put yourself in a situation where authorities are suspicious of you. I think bank and law enforcement bureaucracy can get off on the wrong track, refuse to admit they are wrong, and really harass someone who got themselves in a situation like this.
Having seen it for myself, it is actually rather surprising how inaccurate proof departments can be sometimes. I remember being surprised that if no cash was involved, we tellers didn't even have to care if the checks matched the total on the deposit slips. And interesting enough, even if you claimed up to 10 dollars more on the slip than the checks actually added up to - the bank didn't care and would give you the money because it wasn't worth their time to make the correction. I used to wonder if people ever realized this, would they make a tiny deposit every single day and claim the deposit to be 10 dollars more than it really was. Seems like a small amount, but over a year I guess it could add up to fair chunk of change.
It doesn’t sound like you needed FR advice here...you’re working the best solution I see possible. I’d be interested to hear in a few days what happens.
It is interesting to see what some of the posters came up with. I was going to go with the “Send the money to me for safe-keeping!” scam myself, but that was taken about 50 posts ago....
Your daughter is lucky to be your daughter.
There’s GOING to be an investigation. There’s a double screw up, at this point an investigation has to happen. The only question is when will they start it.
Everybody seems to be missing what I actually said. I didn’t say move the money tomorrow, I said move the money later, AFTER re-communicating the error to the bank and WAITING, and then after waiting if nothing happens move the money elsewhere and WAIT more, years while going about life. He looked up Texas law, in 4 years the money is hers. The question is how to handle that 4 years. She’s got to get herself in a position to go through normal life until they either figure it out or Texas law says it’s her money.
To me, this is like an encoding error (The bank puts the wrong amount in the magnetic ink numbers at the bottom of the check). Report it to her payroll department and they should file a dispute with the company’s bank to fix the issue. They will contact the bank that took the deposit and they should correct your daughter’s account to fix the error.
In some cases, usually small amounts the bank will correct the company’s account but the depositing bank will not get everything corrected. This happened with my mother’s account on an electric bill and the bank fixed her account (lowered the withdrawal amount to the correct amount of the check) but the electric company never corrected her bill. We are only talking about a $100 in her case but the issue was similar.
Just my 2 cents worth from my 20 years in the banking industry.
After a year -- yes, a year -- she had a stack of letters from bank officials saying that the huge balance was correct and that the bank had not made a mistake. The money was hers.
Then, after she moved to another state, the bank realized their mistake and she was arrested, jailed, and tried. My friend on the jury said they were sympathetic to her and that she had so much documentation, but they still had to convict her.
Her kids went to foster homes while she served a year on prison, and she had to pay back the 40K.
I would advise your daughter not to touch the money, not to transfer it to any other accounts, nothing. It will be sorted out eventually. It would seem that her employer would be interested to know they had paid her an additional 98K my mistake.
Bottom line: Don't touch it!
No, sweetie. We got it figured out.
Remove *her* money from the account. Try for the next two weeks to contact the bank and her company and get it straightened out.
If it’s not resolved after two weeks, open a new acct with a new bank and let the process straighten itself out. (We all have full faith that it will. It might take a couple of audits, but somebody will figure it out eventually.)
Then she can get on with her life. She doesn’t get into trouble by moving the money. She can destroy the checks for that acct and the ATM card to protect the money if it takes a long time to work itself out.
After 4 years, if it’s still there, then you’re right. It is hers.
*****************************
As for the morality of her keeping the money after four years (it’s not going to happen), the way I look at it is this:
Let’s say that a female friend is visiting your home and she’s wearing her boyfriend’s coat. It’s an expensive leather coat - it has some value.
She forgets the coat at your house.
If, after a couple of week of searching and tracing the lost coat back to your house, her or her boyfriend come over and ask for it back - and if you tell them to go pack sand,(they left it so it’s yours now) you would be a thief and very wrong.
But if you spend weeks contacting the girl and her boyfriend by every means possible and they say, ‘yeah, we’ll pick it up’ or ignore your calls and emails, there does reach a point where a reasonable person gives up.
After four years, the boyfriend comes back and wants the coat and you no longer have it, he’s out of luck. “Brother, it’s been four freakin’ years. I sold it.”
He can get mad. He can shout that this was a three thousand dollar coat. He can hire a lawyer and even a judge will look at all of your attempts to contact him and his girlfriend and how much time lapsed and tell him that he’s out of luck.
That’s why there is such a thing as a statute of limitations. There comes a point where it is the other person’s responsibility to pick up their own property. If they don’t, then it’s not everyone else’s responsibility to protect and keep track of their stuff.
At this point, being responsible for someone else’s money is a terrible burden for my daughter. She *really* doesn’t want to screw this up. After 4 years of carrying that burden (after a serious effort to return the money) she’s allowed to let that go.
Make sense?
Wow, it's a good thing she didn't deposit a $3,000 check.
As for her getting the money, believe me the bank is going to claim she input the larger amount at the ATM rather than be out 95,000. The fact her boss posted it on the Internet could be used to show that she had knowledge it wasn't a honest mistake. I'm not accusing her of anything just saying how it would play out in court.
I can't believe people on FR are saying that she has any possibility of keeping the cash. First it would be dishonest. Secondly, the company has not honored and deposited the check yet. You say she deposited it on Wednesday, so her bank got the check Thursday or Friday and checked the payee to ensure that the account could cover that amount. The payor bank would have honored it since they would have enough in the companies account to cover it, and a check in that amount wouldn't be that unusual. The payor bank probably won't get the check til tues. due to Columbus day and I'm sure they will contest. If the check ever got to her company, they will contact her, and will wonder why she didn't contact them.
In conclusion, contact the bank again, put a hold on the account, call the company and explain the error, and in no circumstances transfer the money anywhere.
I’m totally with you across the board. Especially on the morality of it eventually becoming your. The one throwing around the idea that it’s never your money was being silly. Especially given the nature of the law and the extreme wait. Even more so when you realize how much the laws favor the bank anyway, if their error costs you money you have 60 days, they get 4 years.
I’m sure this is a burden on her. All the responsibility, plus of course the practical demonstration of how things you should be able to rely on (banks doing simple math) you really can’t. The good news is she’s got good parenting. Of course the reality is this will probably all settle out by Tuesday afternoon.
Have fun out there.
She could start by talking to the head teller or branch manager at the bank where she made the deposit. She could also notify the senior vice president of the auditing department for the bank (call the main number and ask for the auditing department) to let them know that this situation is not being handled in a timely manner.
They can let her know who she should be talking to, and will probably make it a point to put some pressure on to get things resolved. If that doesn't work, call the Bank president's office or the in-house legal department.
Keep notes of each attempt, and the person talked to, and the dates. Keep the phone bills to prove that the calls were made. Might even want to record her side of the conversation at least. Depending on where you live, it may be illegal to tape the other person without informing them.
I worked many years at a bank as a trouble shooter to get other banks to correct their errors on my bank’s accounts.
I am aware of a situtation where a woman spent the extra money after a long period of time, and went to jail. She knew the deposit was a mistake, and it wasn’t her money-end of story.
I also had a situation where another bank during a computer conversion sent our bank $1 million dollars in error. Many calls were made, but the situation remained uncorrected for over a year, when it was referred to me. Their auditing department was the one that got it cleared up.
So, you're saying that the check cleared for an erroneous amount and that the amount has been deducted from the employer's bank account?
It would be the employer's responsibility to challenge that transaction and have their bank draw the money back from your daughter's bank. The error should be corrected by starting with the employer, then the employer's bank, then your daughter's bank. Anything else is just asking for problems.
If this happened to me, I would be suspicious that somebody at your daughter's bank is prepared to impersonate your daughter and cause some of this money to disappear from your daughters account, perhaps through an ATM, and there may be little evidence that it was not your daughter who got the money.
Years ago I paid a mortgage payment to Bank A for $900. Bank A credited the payment to somebody else and routed my cancelled check through Bank B, and on to my bank. Unfortunately, Bank B processed the check for just $400, so that is the amount deducted from my account.
Weeks after the incident, my lender informed me that I was delinquent, not having made my mortgage payment.
My bank tried to claim that there was nothing they could do. They changed their tune somewhat when I pointed out that they had honored my check for $900 but only paid out $400. That meant that I could close my account with them and pocket their $500. At that point they got interested but still didn't know what to do.
It was a lady at the local branch of my lender's bank who took an interest. She found the problem interesting and took it on. After several weeks, there was a complex transaction designed to involve all three banks to correct the two errors.
It was your daughter's bank who made the error, by honoring a check for the wrong amount. I would give each level of management at her bank about 15 minutes to accept responsibility for the error before demanding to speak to the next level of management. Eventually your daughter will find herself talking to somebody at her bank who doesn't want to explain all this to the bank's CEO and they will own the problem.
This is why I won’t use the ATM checking deposit. I have heard of several errors. They are trying to cut down on tellers and business within the bank. Not going for it. I can understand why you won’t say, but I bet it’s BoA.
The “Statute of Frauds” is a legal doctrine which sometimes applies to an atempt to transfer real estate by oral agreement. Has nothing to do with this and that’s because you don’t know what you are talking about.
As to the UCC provisons you cite, I not only have “read such a thing” I have won awards in the study of the Uniform Commercial Code in general and in the area of Negotiable Instruments in particular.
From the facts as described here, and as Marie seems to already have researched and figured out, the rules for the good faith deposit of a check and the time period for a bank to challenge the check seem to have nothing to do with this case.
This is a clerical or computer error by the bank regarding her account and the amount she actually deposited, and “the money” is almost certainly not hers after 10 days.
Not intended as legal or professional advice of any kind only intended to tell you not to be a jackass and get yourself or others in trouble by thinking you are an expert on the UCC, Brady, banking, criminal or civil liability until you have a little thing called a law degree and even then not until you specialize in this field and have all the documentation and have had a thorough discussion with those involved.
BFD. She should be thankful that 98K is not rich in Obama's America (not yet, anyway).
But seriously, if anything whatsoever bad happens to her as a result of this error, she should go for far more than a measly $1,098,000!
Was someone from the bank stationed in the jury room, covering the jurors with an AK?
It’s not BoA. It’s actually a good bank with the best customer service that I’ve ever encountered. The people are friendly and helpful.
I’m just getting the feeling the nobody understands the horrible position that this girl has been put in.
She’s liable for this money.
A couple of years ago, a waiter stole our debit card number (as a credit card) and sold it. The number was sold within 24 hours and a tiny ‘test’ run was done. I did notice the charge, but it was only for a couple of dollars and I thought I was just having a ‘blonde’ moment and not remembering. I let it go.
Two months later, we got wiped out within hours. Everything. Our checking acct was tied to our savings, so as the checking acct was drained, the savings was drained as well.
The scam goes like this: You have someone who supplies you with numbers (person A). They bring the card information to person B. Person B does a tiny test run to make sure that the numbers are good, then lets it sit for awhile. People who need bills paid contact person B. Person B charges them about 50 cents on the dollar.
So if you have an electric bill that’s $300, you’ll pay person B $150. Person B uses the stolen card information and pays the bill over the phone.
I contacted the cops. I contacted the FBI. I called everyone I could think of and NOBODY CARED. We had all of the accounts that my card had been used to pay. The cops could’ve asked the companies for the information on the acct holders and possibly caught Person B that way.
The bank put all of our money back fast, so people acted like I was making a big deal out of nothing by wanting these people caught and sent to prison. “Why do you care? You got your money back’. You have a new account. We’ve got better things to do.”
So I know that these things happen. And every day that my this money sits in my daughter’s account, there is a risk that something will happen to it.
Add to that the fact that anything she does to protect the money (getting it out of her checking acct) would be seen as a suspicious act, and it’s really infuriating.
If this isn’t cleared up by Thursday, I’m write them a letter threatening legal action if they don’t remove the money from her acct. There are too many liabilities.
We should NOT be responsible for the bank leaving it’s valuables lying around.
When my son left his bike in the driveway and it got run over, we didn’t feel sorry for him in the slightest. We’d warned him and we told him that if the bike was that important to him, he would’ve put it away.
But the way the laws are written, if the bank’s ‘bike’ gets run over after they left it in my daughter’s driveway, she goes to jail and has to buy them a new bike.
BS!
No, but I get your point. The jury followed the law. She spent money that she knew was not hers. My friend on the jury said that moving to another state didn't help her either. She knew she was doing wrong.
What makes you think this? Assuming that she never claimed to have made such a deposit, then the fault is entirely the bank's. This is why it is so important not to do anything with the account that could create such a liability.
Assuming you are correct and that your daughter's employer has mistakenly paid this enormous amount, that employer should have half a dozen lawyers appear at the bank that made the error first thing this morning.
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