A $1.2M Bank Error Buys a House, and an Arrest | Hacker News Reader

A $1.2M Bank Error Buys a House, and an Arrest

nytimes.com

14 pointseigenhombre17 comments

"has been charged with bank fraud, illegal transmission of monetary funds and theft greater than $25,000, the authorities said."

Schwab screwed up and sent the wrong amount of money and the owner of the account decided to keep the money. I understand that Schwab should get their money back but why is the women being charged with a crime? This is a civil matter not a criminal matter. From my personal experience, if I accidently send a company too much money, I usually have a really hard time getting my money back and I can't have charges filed against the company. Why does Schwab get to have charges filed against someone but I don't have that ability?

Schwab has more money that you do, so they play by different rules.

Not really, the person who broke the law signed a contract that basically states that the money in the account has to have a set time before it can be pulled out, she ignored it and broke the contract which means she stole from them.

>I usually have a really hard time getting my money back and I can't have charges filed against the company

"can't" appears to be a deliberate exaggeration or outright falsehood. People take large companies to court every single day, sometimes without spending any or much money to do so.

Small claims court exists for a reason. If Apple, Microsoft or BigTechCo wrong you, you can sue them in small claims up to a limit.

I also don't buy your excusing of theft. If I leave a suitcase in a taxi accidentally with $100K in cash inside it, I'd rightly expect it to be a criminal action if the taxi driver took that money and bought a BMW with it.

In high school somebody took a box of checks from my mailbox, forged an ID in my name, and used the account to cash stolen checks. It was a dormant account with a $0 balance.

When he was caught, I was notified and found $3,000 in it that wasn’t mine.

I waited a year for somebody to take the money back but nobody did. I contacted the bank four times after asking them to take the money back, and they all just kind of shrugged and said “well, it’s not our money either”. I asked them to make a note on my account every time that I requested this.

After another year I bought my first brand new laptop on my way to college with it and I never heard about it again.

Still debating if this was the “right” thing to do, but even if I had walked away from it, I couldn’t have closed the account without withdrawing it, and escheatment laws would have forced the bank to return the money to me one way or another.

Let it go.

This is just another classic example of how rules are different for poor and rich people. Big bank deposits a million dollars into a person's bank account. Person takes the money that is in their account and spends it. Person did something illegal? Hmm?

How different do you think it would have played out if the person was rich?

We know:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...

The difference is between someone getting their own money back a bit ahead of schedule vs someone getting the money they were not owed at all. Framing it as rich vs poor is misleading.

What about the Verizon Math incident? Verizon charging 100x over a math mistake and refusing to update or refund. What criminal charges were made there?

Criminal charge requires criminal intent. A customer service representative being bad at math is not criminal intent. Again, it is not rich vs poor, it is "knowingly enriched themselves with other people's money" vs not that.

There wasn't proven criminal intent here either. It wasn't labeled "Stolen Money" it just looked like a deposit.

> it just looked like a deposit.

Kind of like finding a suitcase of cash in your backyard.

But if you read the article, it seems she got into trouble by spending the money, while being hard to contact.

It could be innocent, I rarely answer the phone. But if I see 1M deposit I'm not going to spend the money before I have a clue where it's coming from.

Lol, even if it was a legitimate deposit through some extreme luck, you might want to workout the taxes before you spend it.

She had a contract limiting how much or how long to wait for withdraws from the account, she broke the contract making it theft.

I was more referencing the bank in this case. They screw up royally, and the little guy gets arrested.

And on the flip side, the middle class and working poor are forced to use tons of financial systems with zero forgiveness or margin for error. "Come on guys, can't you see that was a honest mistake? Can't you cut me a little slack?" is always met with an look of disgust and an insinuation that no, you're an adult and must always do everything perfectly or get brutally penalized for it. In a fair world, this insanely rigid standard would apply both ways, but of course, life is unfair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com