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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, if a bank moves $3 million to my account, and I spend it, it's fraud.

If I understand the article correctly, the equivalent here would be that the bank owed you $3 million to be paid over the next 10 years but paid it all to you today in one lump sum.

Now if they had paid you $5 million, that might leave you open to a fraud charge if you spent it because you were never expecting that much. But if they paid you the $3 million they were going to pay you but just 10 years early…is it different?

That said, I reckon it’s clearly an error. ;)

I think it would be more like: Someone owns you $3 million, and then someone else erroneously sends you $3 million.

Except that the "someone else" was employed for the purpose of facilitating the payment from the party that owes you money, back to you.

What if the someone else happens to be the bank of the first person and the transfer is done under the name and reference of the first person?

How about this you have a mortgage on a house for 3 million and lender is worried you will stop paying maybe because you missed some payments.

Now you schedule a bill pay at your bank for back payments to your lender and your bank messes up and pays off the entire mortgage with their money.

The lender then recieves a lump sum payment from you which pays off the mortgage and they are happy.

More like, someone owes you $3m, they have a guy that comes to your house and pays you the instalments for them. They accidentally pay you the full $3m out of their own pocket. As far as you're concerned, that's the money owed to you, so it's their problem to recoup that from the debtor.

that guy had a bad day, paying off people's debts, and all but one of the people said 'yeah, mistakes happen, ok'. this one says 'nope, too bad'. they might be legally right to keep it, and so would the others, but the others care about integrity, reputation, and relationships. it seems greedy and sociopathic to keep it but maybe the guy needs to learn from his mistake and they're teaching an important lesson.

Bingo! They were supposed to send $1.5 Million "Instead of sending the money from Revlon’s account, Citi transferred $900 million to a group of lenders from its own account," so it is a mistake. Something they said as soon as they found out. Whatever is owed is separate and has to be solved based on that agreement.

An American friend of mine living here had a decent chunk of money transferred to his account by an American company.

Next three (or so) days he try to give it back and they wouldn't listen.

Next day after that they contact him to say he needs to give the money back immediately "or else".

"Why wasn't this important to you three days ago when I tried to give the money back?"

Always, always, always keep correspondence like this in a form that can be shown in court.

The judge will NOT be friendly to the other side.

Maybe not, if the bank owed you $3 million, but wasn't due until next year.

What if the bank owed you $3 million to begin with?

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