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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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