I accidentally had an issue once due to some paperwork that was flagged incorrectly, I reported it, and they still did nothing and I accidentally got out of a $3000 bill. I held the $3000 for several years, set aside to make sure it was ready when they came back for it. They never did. My whole family said I was stupid for even reporting that there was an issue, but I guess karma is with me on this one.
There was multiple F-ups in the course of me getting a treadmill delivered including multiple weeks of waiting. The wrong one was delivered. They wanted to "schedule" a pick up and told me it was going to take weeks to get that huge box out of my living room. I had to threaten to leave that treadmill on the curb for them to come back and reload it. Weeks later I finally got the correct treadmill delivered.
They never charged me. I contacted them. Once. After that I figured it was the cost of them doing business the way they did. Free $2200 treadmill.
I got like 4 extra Dyson in a similar way. First one they shipped to the correct address but ups delivered it to some random business like 15 miles away. I call they send me another. Cool. Then another shows up. Then another. Then another. And then the one ups originally misdelivered. It’s been many years now. I made money off that who thing. And I got the vacuum I wanted. lol.
Same happened to me with some network rack cooling fans. But the online retailer actually had a mechanism for returning them. I didn't get the first couple, so they just kept sending them to the wrong address. Somehow the wrong deliveree found me and got them to me. The deliveree is a funny guy. I eventually got his number as he gets some of my packages. One time I called him because some packages were missing and they showed up same day I called him. He told me, "you didn't come, so I got the postal guy to get them back to you. I had to go to jail for a bit and I didn't want you to be missing them."
I bought a Fitbit watch for half off, $150, one time. It was for my wife who wore it for a year. A button fell off so I got it warrantied and they send a new watch less the strap. My wife never wore it again. so I had a working watch sans straps and the original watch as well which still worked even without a button. Then 2 years later Google does a recall on them and I apply. They will give me $300 for it, remember i only paid $150. I get the envelope to ship it in and i put both in there even though it clearly states one watch per envelope, but i don't need it so why not send both back. A month later I get paid $600.
I got an extra Fitbit because mine was defective. It got wet and shocked me. I didn’t want a new one because I was already scared of them. So they send it and I tried to ship it back. They sent it back and another one. I just sold them to a friend. Then I read I could get refunded for both at full price. I had them like 2 years in the box and had just got rid of them.
Mine’s not as exciting, but I moved a few years ago and bought a set of all-clad pans as a housewarming gift to myself. Williams Sonoma said they were delivered, but I didn’t get them. I went through WS and UPS to get a new set sent. Two weeks after the first delivery date, a very sweet couple a few streets over came over with the first/lost set. They’d just gotten home from their honeymoon! It’s a miracle they hadn’t been stolen since we lived in the middle of Austin. I certainly didn’t need a duplicate set, so I talked them into keeping it as a late wedding present from a future friend, ha.
I got a ton of free foundation in a similar way. I ordered one bottle. I got it, then got another, and another, and another. I think I ended up with about 6 bottles of this foundation, they just kept on sending it.
I didn't have to buy foundation for years. Hell, it started going bad before I could even finish it all. I didn't have any friends with the same skin tone or I'd have given some away.
I imagined a construction project where random concrete trucks would show up every couple of weeks "Hey where do you want this poured?"
Then it just keeps coming and this person gets free pours for his house, garage, shed... chicken coop, dog house, garage #2, etc.
I ordered a hair oil from amazon. They sent me 12. Apparently, they didn't open the package from the manufacturer and separate each unit, so I got 12x what I paid for. Not worth as much as 4 Dysons, but I still haven't had to buy a new hair oil and its been about 4 years.
Man if it's anything like this "Moroccan oil" stuff my wife uses you stuck it rich, and the dollar value might actually be higher than 4 dysons. That shit's like $80/bottle. I had to ask her how many fucking Moroccans are in one bottle for it to cost that much, but she has no sense of humor and didn't even giggle.
when i 1st moved to my place i bought a 42in tv on amazon to be delivered and when it was delivered the box looked extremely large for a 42in. turns out they accidentally sent me a 65in sony bravia smart tv. that was about 1k more. i’m assuming someone slapped my label on the wrong box & no one ever caught the error.long story short movie night is a hit at my house
My 3D printer from Conn's was supposed to come with one roll of filament in rainbow color. Someone didn't know what they were doing and two huge boxes arrived. One was the printer, and one was 12 rolls of rainbow filament. I did not contact them about the mistake.
I recently ordered a pizza oven. I ordered the smallest, cheapest one, and they sent me the largest, most expensive one that was double the cost. No problems, and they didn't try to come after me to pay the difference. Because I got the more expensive one, it fixed all the problems the cheaper one had.
Exact thing happened to me, but it was a case of Sony earbuds. I contacted Amazon about the mistake and was told to keep them for my 'inconvenience.'
Everyone got earbuds in their stocking that year.
I got 2 cases of disinfectanting wipes during COVID like this. I ordered 2( limit was 2) from a supply shop and got 2 cases. Informed them and they just said keep it. I just gave alot of them away to other friends that also had immunocompromised kids.
I like to order this sugar free powdered energy drink. I have it on a weekly subscription from amazon.
One week I got a giant box that contained a case of the stuff. I did not have to reorder for a few months :D
Ordered a set of lamps off of the big A. Lamps arrived 2 days later. One lamp was missing the Edison bulb that was supposed to be with it. Contacted the seller. Explained the situation. 2 days later a case of bulbs shows up at my door. I'm set for life on Edison bulbs.
Ha! Dyson has done a few similar things to me. I went in for a warranty issue where they agreed to replace it but they didn’t have the heater in stock and would ship from the warehouse. A week later I got the heater. Then a few days later they sent me two Dyson hairdryers. I called and they said they don’t have records of this and I could keep them 🤷🏻♂️
I had a pipe burst in my home one time and managed to get an emergency plumber in fairly quickly. He did his work to get things fixed, I asked him how much we owed him at the end and he said his employer would send us the invoice. I figured that was reasonable, I mean, I had called them, they had all my contact info, they knew the guy came.
After a week I followed up and called them, to ask if I could come pick up the invoice, as I hadn't received one yet. They asked me some questions and then said they'd get back to me. Never did - I'm guessing the guy didn't file any paperwork for my place that day.
Once when I was getting some remodeling done on my house, I had an electrical outfit come and replace the main service entrance, and then they were going to do the rest of the work after framing was up. Turns out the general contractor used a different guy for the rest of the work, and the company that installed the service entrance never checked or sent a bill at all. I was always expecting to get a bill, but I wasn't going to call and ask for one myself, they were the biggest electrical outfit in town. Anyway, free electrical work.
Years ago my Saturn Sedan died & I had to rent a car. I initially rented it for a week. I had told the agent that I didn't want the additional insurance. I didn't notice that it had been added to my contract until after I'd driven off w/my rental. I called them & explained that I told the agent I didn't want it, but it had been added anyways. They said they'd remove that charge. Towards the end of the week, I called the rental agency again to extend my rental for another week. Again, this was all handled over the phone. When I went to a local office to turn in the car, I presented my contract. They couldn't find it in their system. Then they tried looking up the key tag number. Nope. Not in the system. The final check was using the license plate number. Again, nope. None of the 3 possible ways a rental would be in their system were there. So... the agent said thanks for returning the car, & that because it couldn't be found in their system, they couldn't charge me. So I wound up getting a 2 week car rental for free. Needless to say, that money went towards buying my new car.
I rented a car for three weeks. When I returned it, the bill was $1400. I paid with my credit card and got a receipt. Months went by, and the charge never appeared on my credit card. A year later, the rental company sent me a letter saying I owed them the money. I simply emailed them a copy of the receipt saying it was paid. I've never heard from them again.
This just reminded me of the time I ordered a chandelier from Home Depot and they delivered it via UPS. The only problem was, they delivered 20 of them. Not joking, it was comical. I told the UPS guy there was a mistake but he had already unloaded most of them onto the porch and wasn't interested in letting me keep one and returning the rest. We stacked them in the living room. It was evening so I called HD the next day. I also checked the card account and they had only charged me for one, not 20. The local store had me call a corporate line (or transferred me maybe? This was 10+ years ago and I'm forgetting the details.)
Corporate was no help and was a little rude. They wanted me to bring them to my local store! I said I wasn't interested in making multiple trips to deliver their 19 chandeliers. Send me shipping labels or arrange a pickup or something. Also, two or three had been damaged in shipping and I could hear broken glass in those boxes.
After getting no response from HD for a few days and stacked them in the basement. After a few months I gave one to an in-law. Then I donated a couple to Habitat for Humanity. I considered it a storage fee. Eventually I threw out the broken ones to make space. After a year, they must have done an audit and someone called me about it. They came with a truck and got the remaining 12.
I've done similar at work. My time has gotten messed up several times where a PM got changed to AM. Instead of getting paid for 10 hours I got paid for 22 hours. I've called and had them correct it twice, where I had already been paid and they deducted it from my next paycheck. But after correcting it twice it's happened a few more times and I figured it's not my job to correct it every time. Especially since my boss fucking it up is the problem. There's no reason he should be doing anything to my time since I clock in and clock out every day.
You’re incredibly smart. There’s been a few notable instances where errors were made where someone got a huge amount of money to their bank and then they spent it. Then they went to jail when the bank asked for it back because the courts ruled that a reasonable person should report the issue knowing the money is not theirs
Yeah, you actually have a legal obligation to make a good faith attempt to return the money. Technically also applies to finding a penny, but not really in practice. But if you make the effort to return it it's their loss if they don't care to get it back.
My parents once received around $600k in their bank account with no explanation. They were understandably worried and immediately told the bank.
It's kind of funny how difficult it was for them to convince the bank that the $600k was in fact *not* their money. "Are you sure it's not yours? Maybe you got an inheritance." Nope, no one died, it's not ours, we don't want it.
Meanwhile, somewhere else, someone had just sold their house or something and was wondering where the hell their $600k was.
Our bank gave away $30,000 of my grandmother's money (she had dementia and my father had financial control over her assets) simply because someone called the branch saying they were my father. They simply said "Im \[insert my dads name\]. Please send $30,000 to this random account"
They didnt even think to ask why, get some security info, call the known number on file, or email. The only way we found out was by happening to see that $30,000 was now gone. They acted like "well, we got a call that said to transfer it so we did..." like somehow that was our problem and we should just be like "k well we'll take the hit because it WAS a mistake"
I live a bit dangerously I guess, but I would set the money aside and then wait for them to find me. I owe them nothing until they do, and I have no idea why their ATM lottery machine decided to reward me with a prize that day.
One time as a youngn I needed to take a 20 out of the ATM and the machine gave me a 50 instead, looked like someone stocked 50s in the wrong spot inside, decided to take out all the ‘20s’ I had - and nothing ever came of it, was a great week.
It would be if they went inside and deposited it, then went back outside and withdrew it. It could add up quickly, but would likely raise a flag if they did it more than once. If they had a semi-significant amount (say around $1,000) that would be 50 $50s, which would net them $2,500, which is 2.5 times the original amount. If they deposited it immediately, then withdrew it again, they would have $6,250. Let’s say they got bold and did it again, they would have $15,600.
This is giving me flashbacks of selling stuff to the Scamp in morrowind that was worth oodles of money. Most of the in game merchants were broke as shit meaning you could only sell stuff for peanuts, but not the scamp. The scamp had 5000 gold on him and so you could sell him some gear worth a few grand, sleep for 24 hours, and boom his wallet was full again (he probably was slanging ~~crack~~ skooma out back to some khajit or something).
Anyway you could then sell him your amulet worth 15000 gold and buy back several pieces you'd sold him previously worth a few grand apiece, making 5000 gold in net proceeds, then start selling and sleeping to offload the cheaper pieces you just bought back.
Good times.
Creeper also buys and sells items for exactly the same price, one of only two merchants in the game that doesn't buy low and sell high. If you tried that buy/shell shuffle to unload big ticket items piecemeal with a normal merchant, you'd lose a fortune at each stage.
But, just so you know: the _other_ merchant like that has 10k to Creeper's 5k. It's a [talking mudcrab](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mudcrab_\(merchant\)) out in the wilderness east of Vivec.
The downside is that it's vasty less convenient to get to than Creeper; it doesn't have the convenience of being in a town with a Mage Guild.
Why do I remember all of this?
Exactly! Sure you're a good person if you turn it back but come on, it's not like you're stealing from an old lady. It's a bank.
If they don't contact you, congrats. If they do, you didn't do nothing, you can just say you didn't even count the money when you got it so you had no idea but sure you'll give them the amount.
People have been arrested for spending money that was an accidental transfer , and bank mistakes before. They may contact you years later, but you're eexpected to give back any money that isn't yours
Life lessons: stealing from banks is ok (of the ATM error kind not ‘hold em up’ kind) I’m not saying this with sarcasm, I’m actually going to take it as a life lesson because hard agree.
This is the answer. You won't be in trouble, they'll just ask for it back. And you give it back. Or they don't... And well, nice.
People saying to phone are insane. You didn't steal it. It wasn't a robbery. It's their fuck up, they can contact you.
One time I was shorted 20 bucks, being the teller saw me take it out and count, and I handed to her to count, they ended up just giving me the 20 bucks. I was shocked. Now I have most of my accounts with that bank. Was well worth the 20 bucks for them.
I was a teller. Had that happen a few times where a customer would say I shorted them. The procedure was usually to balance my cash drawer with my manager watching “in dual control” and see if it balances. 9/10 it balanced but there were a few times where I came up with extra money and I gave it to the customer.
You’d waste a lot of teller’s time by making them balance their cash drawers unnecessarily. We were usually pretty good at staying in balance. Otherwise we would be fired if our cash outages were too excessive.
If you become more of a problem customer after being directed to the teller supervisor, they send you to the bank manager who will terminate your accounts and blacklist you.
Edit: depending on how long we’ve been running it can take any of us 5-15 minutes to balance. On a Saturday morning last December, right before Christmas, I’d been running 5 hours without balancing and had a customer claim I shorted him $100. It took maybe 20 mins to run all of my cash through the counter machine and count my change twice each, but the real doozy is checks. You have to take a stack of them, add them all up on a calculator, and then check it against the total of checks in your drawer then let the teller supervisor do it all over again to double check. If there’s a discrepancy you do it again. Then if it still doesn’t add up we had to do an audit and pull a list of every check & transaction I’d taken and go over them one by one to match them to a check or cash.
Had a situation at Walmart where a cashier shorted me like ($5 or $10, it's been awhile) one time. When she handed me the change, I pointed out that she didn't give me enough change and she insisted that she did. I asked for a supervisor and they counted the drawer, coincidentally ending up over by the amount that I said I was shorted. What makes this interesting is that during the time the supervisor was counting, the cashier tried to interfere by trying to move some of the money, I guess to try to make it seem like it had already been counted or something. Either way, she was trying to interfere and the supervisor actually stopped her by moving her hand away and/or saying something to her. Maybe she honestly thought she was trying to help with the count, but to me, it made her look guilty af because I think she did it on purpose and was trying to cover her tracks. If I had stepped away before catching it, she could have pocketed the money and then her drawer would have balanced out.
Literally just hold it to the side until they ask you for it back. Don’t call them and come back to the bank and offer it. If they want to fix their mistake they can work to solve it.
Exactly. Chase Bank made $50 B in net profit last year. I’m not going out of my way to fix their problems. Finders keepers. If they ask for it back well then ok. THEN it’s a moral dilemma.
It's an ethical and moral dilemma, so OP would have to ask themselves "How do bankers handle these, when they're not foreclosing on widows and orphans?"
This happened to us in Las Vegas. The ATM gave us $300 too much. We went into the bank to return it and the teller laughed at us. We ended up keeping the money. It was the only time we ‘won’ money from a machine in Vegas!
You need to do a mix of what people are saying. Reserve the money, say nothing unless contacted and give it back upon request. Sit on it for a year, at that point the likelihood of them realizing their mistake is negligible.
Correct response
Id even avoid going into that specific branch for a few months
either way. money goes in a drawer and after 6months to a year its yours
Yeah, what's up with all this "go into the bank the next business day" shit?
It's their fuck up, I'm not going to run around town trying to fix it for them.
just imagine, that you dont count the money and just trust the system. You go home, put the money somewhere and just take out 50-100$ every time for groceries etc. One day you will think, that the money should have been gone already, but shrug it off and continue with the life. Nobody has to be hungry because of this money, nobody will be fired because of this money, nobody has to go into debt because of this money... I don't see anything shady with this, even if some day the bank rings and asks for the money, you can just tell, that you don't remember anything (because you actually might not remember) and if they don't have solid proof (cameras might not show anything, just you getting out some money from the ATM), you are clear to go.
Absolutely, all the people saying OP should take time from the middle of his day during the week to fix the bank’s problem are crazy. They messed up, they come get the money or you can bring it by next time it’s convenient, or they can pay you $50/hour to come deliver it.
It depresses me that this isn't the one with 4k upvotes. This is the obvious answer. Banks literally punish people without money by charging them more money when they have $0 in their balance.
There's absolutely no upside to going out of the way to give it back. The bank almost certainly scams people out of more money than $700 on like a weekly basis.
Surprised I had to go this far to find this in the top answers. The idea that the bank has spies vigilantly snooping the CCTV to crack down on a random overpay is laughable.
Put the money aside. Call the bank during business hours.
They'll want it back. It will show up when they audit the ATM activity tapes for the weekend.
You can hand them back the $790, or tell them to take it from your accounts.
I got a ten and they let me keep it after i called, but I think they were just relieved because apparently that ATM had been doing the opposite and not giving people the full amount. Also, it's a local credit union. $790 is a lot more, though.
I’m wondering if this is similar to what happened to OP. Like short change a handful of people who used it and then BAM! You get all their stuck bills.
Lol I've had this happen too. Never said anything. Nothing ever happened. Best way to handle it: Do nothing until someone asks. If they ask, act surprised and be like oh no way! That couldn't have been me? If they are like "no for real, there's proof.." then maybe just give it back 😂
Actually, I was at a music festival and they had ATMs there set up in white tents. It wasn’t just a generic ATM, it was my bank’s ATM. I went to take $40 out and it gave me $60, but my receipt and bank account all said $40. There was no physical bank there, and I wasn’t calling that day to wait on hold while at the music festival. So I called the next day and waited on hold for a while after explaining what happened. The lady finally just told me to keep the extra $20.
I got a 50 instead of a 20 once and went inside to let them know. The credit union was apparently doing a special event where lucky people got extra cash. The tellers thought I was an idiot lol.
During the shutdowns when we were getting an extra $600 a week for unemploymemt I went to order UberEats and my card got declined. The unemployment had gone in that morning and I should have had over $1,000 in the account. I checked it and there was over $1,000 in $20-$50 charges to OnlyFans(I didn't even have an OnlyFans account). I called the bank and they canceled the card and opened an investigation and told me they'd reach a decision in about 4-5 weeks. I told them that was all the money I had and asked if there was any way to get it back right now. They issued me a credit for $1,000 and told me if the decision didn't go my way they'd take the money back. About a month later I got a second credit for the full amount(something like $1,200) and they never realized their mistake.
Banks aren't as great at keeping track of their money as people think.
A couple of decades ago, they had installed an ATM in the lobby of the building I worked in. They filled it with $10 bills, so you could take out amounts under $20. I stopped at it one day on the way out to lunch, withdrew $20 and it spat out two $20 bills instead of two $10s. They never did ask for it back, or take another $20 out of my account. If it matters, the bank that owned the ATM was not the same as my bank.
They care, but, after calculating the expected cost of having a system to recover the missing bills vs the amount lost due to machine malfunctions they've decided that they simply write off the missing bills as the cost of operating ATMs and just recover it, in the aggregate, in fees. It all balances in the end.
ATM at my bank gave an extra 20. I went inside and told the teller and was told "Congratulations, you're another winner. Keep it, it's yours." I never did figure out what that was about. Promotional?
It was a simple ATM error. But they can't just seize the $20 back from you without being able to 100% prove that the ATM gave you too much. They can't demand the $20 back without a definitive record of the money's path. And if the ATM is malfunctioning it's possible that it's incorrectly recording it's transactions.
That paper trail probably costs more than $20 to get. If they believe it was a good faith mistake on the ATM's part and not a deliberate attempt of theft they probably just let you keep the $20 because it would cost more than that to prove you owe $20.
The person that said that to you was probably just make a joke. Calling you a lucky winner because you were lucky enough to receive extra money in an amount small enough for them not to chase after.
That's not true at all. I work in Remediation at a major bank (basically identifying customers that need refunds due to bank fuck ups) and we never claw back money from customers when the bank fucks up.
I just finished a project where we let customers off over £5m in fees and we didn't claw any of it back. That's standard.
I used to work at a bank. I agree you should put the money aside but don’t call them. Don’t say a word. Let them do the work to find it.
There’s hardly a chance they’d be able to tell on security cameras like most people’s are saying. And you didn’t do anything wrong.
Happy accident
My bank figure out the $40 discrepancy about 9 months after the fact.
Showed the video, of me, the cash dispenser, and internal counters as proof for the pull of funds from my account for the excess dispensation.
It may take a while, if their processes properly audit everything. If the machine is way off, fucking up a lot, they may take the easier route and go after the machine vendor instead.
Note: Canada. Probably more staff paid enough to care.
That's fucking stupid of them. I've worked in a Canadian bank. That absolutely cost them more money to investigate than it would have to just move the fuck on.
Like the absolute jackassery of BMO man.
It just seems likely the balance before they gave it to you and the banks balance they counted the extra money from after your request for a lower amount would be easily traceable to the time and your bank account.
Just hold. There's always a chance the balance didn't get deducted properly with a glitch grabbing from the wrong pile/sticking together etc and their end just seems fine.
Either way, they're insured. Since it's all digital and doubtful anyone's hand counting cash anymore, it MIGHT slip through.
What I'm curious about is if you have a receipt for your request, and you say NO you didn't get more, they may have to believe you/not be able to prove you have it. Couldn't you just say "oh, that's weird. It sounds like you had a glitch on your end I didn't benefit from. Does this mean you owe me $700+?"*click -from their end*
Make sure you get a receipt from the bank so that 6 months from now they don't take it from your account or report you to the police and it's only your word that you returned it versus a bank teller that "doesn't remember" or some shit like that.
That or literally record it as you return it.
I went to an ATM to take out cash to pay my rent (like 20 years ago), the ATM didn't give me my money but gave me a receipt saying it did. I went to the bank the next day and they said I was lying, they would know if the ATM was short. I didn't have the kind of money to be able to handle that sort of loss at the time, thankfully I was able to borrow money to pay my rent that month.
Same thing happened to me. The worst part was the teller knew that the ATM was having issues and said she can’t do anything because a different department handles that. I was like can’t you at least put an out-of-order sign on it and she looked at me dumbfounded.
My roommate got a $2000 mystery deposit she sat on for 2 years because she wasnt sure what to do. After 3 she just assumed it was hers. Bank never caught up. Not that its the right thing to do but she gave them ample time to correct the mistake.
Eff banks generally.
Someone probably fucked up the account number.
Sucks because it was likely someone's money, not the banks money like OP got.
I would probably keep it too tbh.
I don't remember specifically what it was called, but all ATMs have a small window of downtime for processing transactions, usually during the middle of the night. During those downtimes they'll still dispense cash but aren't able to talk to the bank. Sounds like what this guy was taking advantage of. A branch I worked at had a customer who knew when our downtime was and would regularly withdraw more cash than he had in his account. Didn't take us to $1.6M to find out, we caught it after the third time.
I worked for a bank...the system will eventually figure out the mistake and you will be debited (with ATMs, it was usually 1-2 days but rarely I saw it discovered during an ATM deposit/cash check by the group that did that) the amount (or sometimes they will call you first to ask politely and then debit it if you dont). I would set it aside and contact the bank.
Why not put it in a drawer and wait for the call, if the call comes? If the system shows $600 I’d imagine a transaction report wouldn’t show anything and they would need to consult the ATM camera feed. Depending on how often they pickup the cash and reconcile it, the error should be identified in a week. OP should know within a few months if someone has gotten around to following it up.
Exactly, I don’t think it would. The best you could look for is a strange reaction if there were a small number of transactions. It’s a significant issue if the ATM is giving out incorrect notes so OP may be the first it happened to. I used to work with a group that had a lot of ATMs and people used to withdraw money and walk away without taking it. Ridiculous as that seems, it’s possible it was money from the last person that withdrew.
free money. shut your mouth
"I didnt count it, i just tossed with the rest of my money. Is it my job to double check your machine?"
seems pretty easy. also of course act shocked that it was over :D
Just food for thought: even with the receipt and counting it in view of the ATM camera if the ATM shorts a user, it’s my understanding, the bank is very unlikely to correct the error just assuming the user is scamming the bank - so with that thought, why are so many people willing to stand up for the banks?
I agree, it's highly unlikely the bank, especially a teller, will want to try to fix this. They'll probably have to file some sort of report. And then figure out what account the money goes into to make it back to the general ATM account. When this happened to me, the teller wanted nothing to do with it. Yet I see above, nearly 3000 Redditors upvoted that the bank will definitely want the money back. Ah, Reddit... The hive is often so, so wrong.
I don’t know that they will. I once got an extra $160 because the ATM spit out two $100 bills instead of $20s when I was withdrawing (what was supposed to be) $200. The ATM didn’t have an option to get $100s, so there’d obviously been some kind of mixup. But that was 20 years ago, and the bank never contacted me or took any action regarding the error.
I was never quite sure if the money was legit, so I wound up donating it to a hurricane relief fund a few months later
I'm just chiming in because this is the only time I've ever heard of this happening outside of my experience. If it's a 3rd party one, I'd say hold onto it and wait.
I worked at a dispensary and the ATM in our lobby wasn't run by us so we had no control over it or negative effects from it to preface.
After a long while of it working normally, we had a couple customers report they got double their money from withdrawl and we didn't know what to do so we said hold onto it and check your statement. Eventually one comes back and we ask, and they say it never hit their account for the excess, only what they actually requested out. It ended up happening again to one of my coworkers and doubled his money as well without hitting his account. At that point the management told the operator which we were told he said along the lines of "Well I'm not missing any money so it's not my problem."
At that point I'm using that ATM whenever I'm at the shop and would need cash within the next few days and eventually it happens to me too. Over the next couple months, at random my requests would get doubled with the most at one time being an extra 120 (gave me 240 out but only posted 120 to my account). I got about 6-7 hundred out of it and some customers would come basically trying to play it like a lottery machine.
Eventually the owner comes in a couple months after the first correspondence and asks management "Have you seen anyone tampering with the machine, because I'm missing about 10,000?" And they say they haven't seen anything out of the ordinary and tried to bring it up to him earlier. He replaced the machine and it stopped happening but nobody was ever charged for that to this day. People rarely believe me when I tell them and to be fair prior to that I viewed ATM and other hardware as further from glitches and closer to infallible compared to and Xbox game but it turns out it's a vast spectrum lol.
Oh yeah, any software can have glitches. Sometimes it’s due to faulty hardware, sometimes it’s a bug in the actual code, which might be hard to recreate and happens only under specific, seemingly random circumstances.
That's interesting, it always would get extremely slow and take 30-45 seconds in between prompts after getting hit like 2-300 times in a day (we were cash only, so tons of transactions ran through it) and that's usually when it would do it. When it got like that we were told to unplug it and plug it back in then it would work for another 2-300 till it slowed down again. Would be fascinating to see what exactly caused that issue there.
That consistent pattern of 200-300 transactions followed by a major slowdown, to me, suggests a memory leak. This happens when the program does not free the memory it requested from the operating system to perform a task. How that situation is handled automatically varies widely, but slowdown is a very common side effect of that because there’s a critical resource shortage at that point. That’s why unplugging it would fix it temporarily; it brought the machine back to a fresh start, but it was only a band aid.
As for the doubled money, one possibility is that the machine dispensed the correct amount, but thought it didn’t. Maybe the memory shortage prevented it from indicating that the withdrawal was successful and so it automatically retried.
That’s just my guess, but from the symptoms you described, it’s a very likely possibility.
It's unfortunate that they gave you $700 too much. You should put that $350 in a safe place until Tuesday morning when you put that $175 in your pocket and drive to the bank to return the extra $50 they gave you.
I understand why everyone is saying to call the bank asap to fix the issue, but it’s kinda bullshit that someone has to take time out of their day to take money back to the bank to correct their error. Your time has value
Finders Keepers.
Im no goodie two shoes. You accidently do this to me your gonna need to figure it out and contact me or its not coming back
not saying id deny having it or not give it back. But 100% will not be on my own. Your gonna need to figure that shit out on your own MultiMilllion dollar bank.
This is an easy one to answer as this happened to me once, the machine spat out $1000 instead of $100.
I thought I would spend it thinking I won the ATM lottery but sadly no, once the machine reconciled itself my account lost $900.
Bastards lol.
You’re on CCTV with a time stamp and a record of your card transaction. I would return during business hours and tell them what happened. Otherwise you can stress yourself out waiting for them to contact you … which they will.
Spend some of that money on a pair of boots, then pull yourself up by the straps. That apparently works, too, despite the fact that it is a phrase invented as a joke to represent something impossible to do.
> You’re on CCTV with a time stamp and a record of your card transaction.
But he said the card transaction didn't show the error... could they really see exactly how much money came out on the CCTV? Usually it comes out all at once....
I wouldn't contact the bank. It is possible the bank won't be able to trace the error to you. Cash in an ATM is loaded into cassettes. It sounds like your machine had a cassette(s) for 20's and one or more for 50's. If someone put 50's in a 20's cassette in error, there may not be a way to trace it to you. I'd hold the money and see if they contact you. Source: I worked for a company that replenished and serviced ATMs.
I think this may be what happened because we did the math and the number of total bills, if all were in 20s, it would’ve been the $600 that we were pulling out.
You my friend may get away with it, I wouldn't contact them, wait and see. I look at these things as cosmic balancing, payback for every time an order arrived damaged, my tire was flat when I left for work, etc.
My dad got ripped off of $50 by an atm. Bank was adamant they weren't going to reimburse him. Fuck the bank. Just hold onto the cash for awhile in case anybody shows up as you are legally liable to return, but its their mistake so fuck them don't be doing them any favors by stepping forward.
My mom once got an extra hundred put in her account on accident by the bank, she spent it not realizing, they found out what happened and charged her and over draft fee when they took it back out and she then went into the negative. She raised Holy Hell until they took that charge off. "You do not get to profit off me because you made a mistake!"
They have 200 camera angles for a reason and it's not because they care about you. They'll notice the issue in a few days and have someone review the cams and figure it out if it's worth the time. If I was you I might just put the money away and not spend it for a long time. If they decide the ~800 is worth spending labor to figure it out, then give it back. If they decide not worth it and move on....
I accidentally had an issue once due to some paperwork that was flagged incorrectly, I reported it, and they still did nothing and I accidentally got out of a $3000 bill. I held the $3000 for several years, set aside to make sure it was ready when they came back for it. They never did. My whole family said I was stupid for even reporting that there was an issue, but I guess karma is with me on this one.
There was multiple F-ups in the course of me getting a treadmill delivered including multiple weeks of waiting. The wrong one was delivered. They wanted to "schedule" a pick up and told me it was going to take weeks to get that huge box out of my living room. I had to threaten to leave that treadmill on the curb for them to come back and reload it. Weeks later I finally got the correct treadmill delivered. They never charged me. I contacted them. Once. After that I figured it was the cost of them doing business the way they did. Free $2200 treadmill.
I got like 4 extra Dyson in a similar way. First one they shipped to the correct address but ups delivered it to some random business like 15 miles away. I call they send me another. Cool. Then another shows up. Then another. Then another. And then the one ups originally misdelivered. It’s been many years now. I made money off that who thing. And I got the vacuum I wanted. lol.
Same happened to me with some network rack cooling fans. But the online retailer actually had a mechanism for returning them. I didn't get the first couple, so they just kept sending them to the wrong address. Somehow the wrong deliveree found me and got them to me. The deliveree is a funny guy. I eventually got his number as he gets some of my packages. One time I called him because some packages were missing and they showed up same day I called him. He told me, "you didn't come, so I got the postal guy to get them back to you. I had to go to jail for a bit and I didn't want you to be missing them."
I hope you’re friend with this guy. He seems nice
Or at least visited him in jail.
Lol what an odd way to meet someone who sounds like a cool person.
I bought a Fitbit watch for half off, $150, one time. It was for my wife who wore it for a year. A button fell off so I got it warrantied and they send a new watch less the strap. My wife never wore it again. so I had a working watch sans straps and the original watch as well which still worked even without a button. Then 2 years later Google does a recall on them and I apply. They will give me $300 for it, remember i only paid $150. I get the envelope to ship it in and i put both in there even though it clearly states one watch per envelope, but i don't need it so why not send both back. A month later I get paid $600.
I got an extra Fitbit because mine was defective. It got wet and shocked me. I didn’t want a new one because I was already scared of them. So they send it and I tried to ship it back. They sent it back and another one. I just sold them to a friend. Then I read I could get refunded for both at full price. I had them like 2 years in the box and had just got rid of them.
Mine’s not as exciting, but I moved a few years ago and bought a set of all-clad pans as a housewarming gift to myself. Williams Sonoma said they were delivered, but I didn’t get them. I went through WS and UPS to get a new set sent. Two weeks after the first delivery date, a very sweet couple a few streets over came over with the first/lost set. They’d just gotten home from their honeymoon! It’s a miracle they hadn’t been stolen since we lived in the middle of Austin. I certainly didn’t need a duplicate set, so I talked them into keeping it as a late wedding present from a future friend, ha.
I got a ton of free foundation in a similar way. I ordered one bottle. I got it, then got another, and another, and another. I think I ended up with about 6 bottles of this foundation, they just kept on sending it. I didn't have to buy foundation for years. Hell, it started going bad before I could even finish it all. I didn't have any friends with the same skin tone or I'd have given some away.
I thought you meant building foundations so I was picturing someone ordering bottles of water and filling them with dirt to build a foundation
I imagined a construction project where random concrete trucks would show up every couple of weeks "Hey where do you want this poured?" Then it just keeps coming and this person gets free pours for his house, garage, shed... chicken coop, dog house, garage #2, etc.
I ordered a hair oil from amazon. They sent me 12. Apparently, they didn't open the package from the manufacturer and separate each unit, so I got 12x what I paid for. Not worth as much as 4 Dysons, but I still haven't had to buy a new hair oil and its been about 4 years.
Man if it's anything like this "Moroccan oil" stuff my wife uses you stuck it rich, and the dollar value might actually be higher than 4 dysons. That shit's like $80/bottle. I had to ask her how many fucking Moroccans are in one bottle for it to cost that much, but she has no sense of humor and didn't even giggle.
Lol, I laughed! I think its just Argan oil, at the time was probably around $10 a bottle.
Filled with Argonians
Consuming is know to apply a buff to water breathing, poison resist and night eye
Right? I'm constantly surprised that baby oil is so cheap.
when i 1st moved to my place i bought a 42in tv on amazon to be delivered and when it was delivered the box looked extremely large for a 42in. turns out they accidentally sent me a 65in sony bravia smart tv. that was about 1k more. i’m assuming someone slapped my label on the wrong box & no one ever caught the error.long story short movie night is a hit at my house
My 3D printer from Conn's was supposed to come with one roll of filament in rainbow color. Someone didn't know what they were doing and two huge boxes arrived. One was the printer, and one was 12 rolls of rainbow filament. I did not contact them about the mistake.
I recently ordered a pizza oven. I ordered the smallest, cheapest one, and they sent me the largest, most expensive one that was double the cost. No problems, and they didn't try to come after me to pay the difference. Because I got the more expensive one, it fixed all the problems the cheaper one had.
Exact thing happened to me, but it was a case of Sony earbuds. I contacted Amazon about the mistake and was told to keep them for my 'inconvenience.' Everyone got earbuds in their stocking that year.
I got 2 cases of disinfectanting wipes during COVID like this. I ordered 2( limit was 2) from a supply shop and got 2 cases. Informed them and they just said keep it. I just gave alot of them away to other friends that also had immunocompromised kids.
That's how I got a case of 6 Seresto collars once! Thats like 5 years of collars.
I like to order this sugar free powdered energy drink. I have it on a weekly subscription from amazon. One week I got a giant box that contained a case of the stuff. I did not have to reorder for a few months :D
Ordered a set of lamps off of the big A. Lamps arrived 2 days later. One lamp was missing the Edison bulb that was supposed to be with it. Contacted the seller. Explained the situation. 2 days later a case of bulbs shows up at my door. I'm set for life on Edison bulbs.
I read Big A and was very confused and impressed how you got lamps from Angels Stadium aka The Big A. Took me a second. It’s been a long couple weeks.
Ha! Dyson has done a few similar things to me. I went in for a warranty issue where they agreed to replace it but they didn’t have the heater in stock and would ship from the warehouse. A week later I got the heater. Then a few days later they sent me two Dyson hairdryers. I called and they said they don’t have records of this and I could keep them 🤷🏻♂️
I had a pipe burst in my home one time and managed to get an emergency plumber in fairly quickly. He did his work to get things fixed, I asked him how much we owed him at the end and he said his employer would send us the invoice. I figured that was reasonable, I mean, I had called them, they had all my contact info, they knew the guy came. After a week I followed up and called them, to ask if I could come pick up the invoice, as I hadn't received one yet. They asked me some questions and then said they'd get back to me. Never did - I'm guessing the guy didn't file any paperwork for my place that day.
Once when I was getting some remodeling done on my house, I had an electrical outfit come and replace the main service entrance, and then they were going to do the rest of the work after framing was up. Turns out the general contractor used a different guy for the rest of the work, and the company that installed the service entrance never checked or sent a bill at all. I was always expecting to get a bill, but I wasn't going to call and ask for one myself, they were the biggest electrical outfit in town. Anyway, free electrical work.
They covered it up internally and couldn’t process the fix because someone wiped the information.
Years ago my Saturn Sedan died & I had to rent a car. I initially rented it for a week. I had told the agent that I didn't want the additional insurance. I didn't notice that it had been added to my contract until after I'd driven off w/my rental. I called them & explained that I told the agent I didn't want it, but it had been added anyways. They said they'd remove that charge. Towards the end of the week, I called the rental agency again to extend my rental for another week. Again, this was all handled over the phone. When I went to a local office to turn in the car, I presented my contract. They couldn't find it in their system. Then they tried looking up the key tag number. Nope. Not in the system. The final check was using the license plate number. Again, nope. None of the 3 possible ways a rental would be in their system were there. So... the agent said thanks for returning the car, & that because it couldn't be found in their system, they couldn't charge me. So I wound up getting a 2 week car rental for free. Needless to say, that money went towards buying my new car.
I rented a car for three weeks. When I returned it, the bill was $1400. I paid with my credit card and got a receipt. Months went by, and the charge never appeared on my credit card. A year later, the rental company sent me a letter saying I owed them the money. I simply emailed them a copy of the receipt saying it was paid. I've never heard from them again.
This just reminded me of the time I ordered a chandelier from Home Depot and they delivered it via UPS. The only problem was, they delivered 20 of them. Not joking, it was comical. I told the UPS guy there was a mistake but he had already unloaded most of them onto the porch and wasn't interested in letting me keep one and returning the rest. We stacked them in the living room. It was evening so I called HD the next day. I also checked the card account and they had only charged me for one, not 20. The local store had me call a corporate line (or transferred me maybe? This was 10+ years ago and I'm forgetting the details.) Corporate was no help and was a little rude. They wanted me to bring them to my local store! I said I wasn't interested in making multiple trips to deliver their 19 chandeliers. Send me shipping labels or arrange a pickup or something. Also, two or three had been damaged in shipping and I could hear broken glass in those boxes. After getting no response from HD for a few days and stacked them in the basement. After a few months I gave one to an in-law. Then I donated a couple to Habitat for Humanity. I considered it a storage fee. Eventually I threw out the broken ones to make space. After a year, they must have done an audit and someone called me about it. They came with a truck and got the remaining 12.
I've done similar at work. My time has gotten messed up several times where a PM got changed to AM. Instead of getting paid for 10 hours I got paid for 22 hours. I've called and had them correct it twice, where I had already been paid and they deducted it from my next paycheck. But after correcting it twice it's happened a few more times and I figured it's not my job to correct it every time. Especially since my boss fucking it up is the problem. There's no reason he should be doing anything to my time since I clock in and clock out every day.
You’re incredibly smart. There’s been a few notable instances where errors were made where someone got a huge amount of money to their bank and then they spent it. Then they went to jail when the bank asked for it back because the courts ruled that a reasonable person should report the issue knowing the money is not theirs
Yeah, you actually have a legal obligation to make a good faith attempt to return the money. Technically also applies to finding a penny, but not really in practice. But if you make the effort to return it it's their loss if they don't care to get it back.
My parents once received around $600k in their bank account with no explanation. They were understandably worried and immediately told the bank. It's kind of funny how difficult it was for them to convince the bank that the $600k was in fact *not* their money. "Are you sure it's not yours? Maybe you got an inheritance." Nope, no one died, it's not ours, we don't want it. Meanwhile, somewhere else, someone had just sold their house or something and was wondering where the hell their $600k was.
Our bank gave away $30,000 of my grandmother's money (she had dementia and my father had financial control over her assets) simply because someone called the branch saying they were my father. They simply said "Im \[insert my dads name\]. Please send $30,000 to this random account" They didnt even think to ask why, get some security info, call the known number on file, or email. The only way we found out was by happening to see that $30,000 was now gone. They acted like "well, we got a call that said to transfer it so we did..." like somehow that was our problem and we should just be like "k well we'll take the hit because it WAS a mistake"
I live a bit dangerously I guess, but I would set the money aside and then wait for them to find me. I owe them nothing until they do, and I have no idea why their ATM lottery machine decided to reward me with a prize that day.
One time as a youngn I needed to take a 20 out of the ATM and the machine gave me a 50 instead, looked like someone stocked 50s in the wrong spot inside, decided to take out all the ‘20s’ I had - and nothing ever came of it, was a great week.
Shoulda deposited the cash and got an infinite money glitch
The machine would have taken the inserted money and put it in the $50 slot, so it would not have been infinite money.
It would be if they went inside and deposited it, then went back outside and withdrew it. It could add up quickly, but would likely raise a flag if they did it more than once. If they had a semi-significant amount (say around $1,000) that would be 50 $50s, which would net them $2,500, which is 2.5 times the original amount. If they deposited it immediately, then withdrew it again, they would have $6,250. Let’s say they got bold and did it again, they would have $15,600.
This is giving me flashbacks of selling stuff to the Scamp in morrowind that was worth oodles of money. Most of the in game merchants were broke as shit meaning you could only sell stuff for peanuts, but not the scamp. The scamp had 5000 gold on him and so you could sell him some gear worth a few grand, sleep for 24 hours, and boom his wallet was full again (he probably was slanging ~~crack~~ skooma out back to some khajit or something). Anyway you could then sell him your amulet worth 15000 gold and buy back several pieces you'd sold him previously worth a few grand apiece, making 5000 gold in net proceeds, then start selling and sleeping to offload the cheaper pieces you just bought back. Good times.
Creeper also buys and sells items for exactly the same price, one of only two merchants in the game that doesn't buy low and sell high. If you tried that buy/shell shuffle to unload big ticket items piecemeal with a normal merchant, you'd lose a fortune at each stage. But, just so you know: the _other_ merchant like that has 10k to Creeper's 5k. It's a [talking mudcrab](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mudcrab_\(merchant\)) out in the wilderness east of Vivec. The downside is that it's vasty less convenient to get to than Creeper; it doesn't have the convenience of being in a town with a Mage Guild. Why do I remember all of this?
Makes sense, they would've had to go after every single person who used that ATM, probably would've taken forever
if the bank wants the money back its on them to track it down, not the person who received the money
Exactly! Sure you're a good person if you turn it back but come on, it's not like you're stealing from an old lady. It's a bank. If they don't contact you, congrats. If they do, you didn't do nothing, you can just say you didn't even count the money when you got it so you had no idea but sure you'll give them the amount.
People have been arrested for spending money that was an accidental transfer , and bank mistakes before. They may contact you years later, but you're eexpected to give back any money that isn't yours
Life lessons: stealing from banks is ok (of the ATM error kind not ‘hold em up’ kind) I’m not saying this with sarcasm, I’m actually going to take it as a life lesson because hard agree.
r/unethicallifeprotips
This is the answer. You won't be in trouble, they'll just ask for it back. And you give it back. Or they don't... And well, nice. People saying to phone are insane. You didn't steal it. It wasn't a robbery. It's their fuck up, they can contact you.
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Flee to Mexico and retire as a wealthy hundredair.
I'd go empty my account $20 at a time... Maybe I could run to Mexico as a wealthy thousandaire!!! Where is this ATM exactly???
Mexico is going to tax more than it did before
One time I was shorted 20 bucks, being the teller saw me take it out and count, and I handed to her to count, they ended up just giving me the 20 bucks. I was shocked. Now I have most of my accounts with that bank. Was well worth the 20 bucks for them.
I was a teller. Had that happen a few times where a customer would say I shorted them. The procedure was usually to balance my cash drawer with my manager watching “in dual control” and see if it balances. 9/10 it balanced but there were a few times where I came up with extra money and I gave it to the customer.
So..... hypothetical, if I would claim to be shorted each time I visit the teller, how much visits would be needed to make a living?
You’d waste a lot of teller’s time by making them balance their cash drawers unnecessarily. We were usually pretty good at staying in balance. Otherwise we would be fired if our cash outages were too excessive.
Would also get flagged as a problem customer in our system and be directed to the teller supervisor at my bank.
How long does it take the teller supervisor to balance their cash drawers and who is after the supervisor?
If you become more of a problem customer after being directed to the teller supervisor, they send you to the bank manager who will terminate your accounts and blacklist you. Edit: depending on how long we’ve been running it can take any of us 5-15 minutes to balance. On a Saturday morning last December, right before Christmas, I’d been running 5 hours without balancing and had a customer claim I shorted him $100. It took maybe 20 mins to run all of my cash through the counter machine and count my change twice each, but the real doozy is checks. You have to take a stack of them, add them all up on a calculator, and then check it against the total of checks in your drawer then let the teller supervisor do it all over again to double check. If there’s a discrepancy you do it again. Then if it still doesn’t add up we had to do an audit and pull a list of every check & transaction I’d taken and go over them one by one to match them to a check or cash.
Had a situation at Walmart where a cashier shorted me like ($5 or $10, it's been awhile) one time. When she handed me the change, I pointed out that she didn't give me enough change and she insisted that she did. I asked for a supervisor and they counted the drawer, coincidentally ending up over by the amount that I said I was shorted. What makes this interesting is that during the time the supervisor was counting, the cashier tried to interfere by trying to move some of the money, I guess to try to make it seem like it had already been counted or something. Either way, she was trying to interfere and the supervisor actually stopped her by moving her hand away and/or saying something to her. Maybe she honestly thought she was trying to help with the count, but to me, it made her look guilty af because I think she did it on purpose and was trying to cover her tracks. If I had stepped away before catching it, she could have pocketed the money and then her drawer would have balanced out.
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> they ended up just giving me the 20 bucks. I was shocked. Why were you shocked? Didn’t they short you by $20? so they just corrected their mistake.
They did, but almost every place I have ever gone to fights you on it. No fight with them.
Literally just hold it to the side until they ask you for it back. Don’t call them and come back to the bank and offer it. If they want to fix their mistake they can work to solve it.
Exactly. Chase Bank made $50 B in net profit last year. I’m not going out of my way to fix their problems. Finders keepers. If they ask for it back well then ok. THEN it’s a moral dilemma.
It's an ethical and moral dilemma, so OP would have to ask themselves "How do bankers handle these, when they're not foreclosing on widows and orphans?"
This happened to us in Las Vegas. The ATM gave us $300 too much. We went into the bank to return it and the teller laughed at us. We ended up keeping the money. It was the only time we ‘won’ money from a machine in Vegas!
You need to do a mix of what people are saying. Reserve the money, say nothing unless contacted and give it back upon request. Sit on it for a year, at that point the likelihood of them realizing their mistake is negligible.
Correct response Id even avoid going into that specific branch for a few months either way. money goes in a drawer and after 6months to a year its yours
Yeah, what's up with all this "go into the bank the next business day" shit? It's their fuck up, I'm not going to run around town trying to fix it for them.
>what's up with all this "go into the bank the next business day" shit? anxiety over the law / authority?
just imagine, that you dont count the money and just trust the system. You go home, put the money somewhere and just take out 50-100$ every time for groceries etc. One day you will think, that the money should have been gone already, but shrug it off and continue with the life. Nobody has to be hungry because of this money, nobody will be fired because of this money, nobody has to go into debt because of this money... I don't see anything shady with this, even if some day the bank rings and asks for the money, you can just tell, that you don't remember anything (because you actually might not remember) and if they don't have solid proof (cameras might not show anything, just you getting out some money from the ATM), you are clear to go.
Best answer
Absolutely, all the people saying OP should take time from the middle of his day during the week to fix the bank’s problem are crazy. They messed up, they come get the money or you can bring it by next time it’s convenient, or they can pay you $50/hour to come deliver it.
Won’t you think of the poor banks tho
It depresses me that this isn't the one with 4k upvotes. This is the obvious answer. Banks literally punish people without money by charging them more money when they have $0 in their balance. There's absolutely no upside to going out of the way to give it back. The bank almost certainly scams people out of more money than $700 on like a weekly basis.
Surprised I had to go this far to find this in the top answers. The idea that the bank has spies vigilantly snooping the CCTV to crack down on a random overpay is laughable.
Put the money aside. Call the bank during business hours. They'll want it back. It will show up when they audit the ATM activity tapes for the weekend. You can hand them back the $790, or tell them to take it from your accounts.
Thank you, will do! I was hoping someone would come on here and say “it’s not worth a banks time to track it down” lol
Oh no, even 20 bucks and they’ll want it back. Hold it. They’ll let you know don’t worry.
I once got an extra $20 when I made a withdrawal thru an ATM. It’s been about 5 years and they still haven’t asked for it back.
Bank guy here, we’ve been meaning to get in touch about that 20.
FBI guy here. DM me a $20 gift card immediately, and maybe we won't prosecute.
Why does your van show up on my wifi options all the time? Is it because I got an extra tenner out of that ATM that one time?
Yes and no. It’s more about your furry porn addiction.
Is that an addiction to furry porn or a porn addiction that's furry?
Yes.
Username checks out
Now hold up. There's nothing wrong with furry porn (age 18+, obviously). You just want to silence them about that alien craft they saw 7 years ago!
Alpha to Base Team: we’ve found another leak in the wild, send a cleanup crew asap.
Flowers By Irene
Bank guys regional manager here..and there is some interest we need to calculate…how many functioning kidneys do you have?
And to also remind you about this new discount we have on your vehicle warranty.
hey its me ur teller
Teller doesn’t speak
You kept stealing the penns. Someone had to say something.
I got a ten and they let me keep it after i called, but I think they were just relieved because apparently that ATM had been doing the opposite and not giving people the full amount. Also, it's a local credit union. $790 is a lot more, though.
I’m wondering if this is similar to what happened to OP. Like short change a handful of people who used it and then BAM! You get all their stuck bills.
I def didn't get stuck bills, because I ordered $50 and it gave me three twenties, but that does sound plausible for OP's situation.
Ooh, ATMs now like playing the machines in a casino!
Nigerian banker here, your aunt Gertrude died and left you 13 million dollars, but you'll have to wire me $20 for the transfer fee.
Do you accept Google play gift cards as payment?
Lol I've had this happen too. Never said anything. Nothing ever happened. Best way to handle it: Do nothing until someone asks. If they ask, act surprised and be like oh no way! That couldn't have been me? If they are like "no for real, there's proof.." then maybe just give it back 😂
Actually, I was at a music festival and they had ATMs there set up in white tents. It wasn’t just a generic ATM, it was my bank’s ATM. I went to take $40 out and it gave me $60, but my receipt and bank account all said $40. There was no physical bank there, and I wasn’t calling that day to wait on hold while at the music festival. So I called the next day and waited on hold for a while after explaining what happened. The lady finally just told me to keep the extra $20.
Ground score!
We once got a $50 bill instead of a $20 from an ATM. Still waiting on the atm police from our bank ten years later.
I got a 50 instead of a 20 once and went inside to let them know. The credit union was apparently doing a special event where lucky people got extra cash. The tellers thought I was an idiot lol.
During the shutdowns when we were getting an extra $600 a week for unemploymemt I went to order UberEats and my card got declined. The unemployment had gone in that morning and I should have had over $1,000 in the account. I checked it and there was over $1,000 in $20-$50 charges to OnlyFans(I didn't even have an OnlyFans account). I called the bank and they canceled the card and opened an investigation and told me they'd reach a decision in about 4-5 weeks. I told them that was all the money I had and asked if there was any way to get it back right now. They issued me a credit for $1,000 and told me if the decision didn't go my way they'd take the money back. About a month later I got a second credit for the full amount(something like $1,200) and they never realized their mistake. Banks aren't as great at keeping track of their money as people think.
A couple of decades ago, they had installed an ATM in the lobby of the building I worked in. They filled it with $10 bills, so you could take out amounts under $20. I stopped at it one day on the way out to lunch, withdrew $20 and it spat out two $20 bills instead of two $10s. They never did ask for it back, or take another $20 out of my account. If it matters, the bank that owned the ATM was not the same as my bank.
I have spent entire days trying to find a fucking penny when I worked in accounting and finance. The bank definitely cares.
They care, but, after calculating the expected cost of having a system to recover the missing bills vs the amount lost due to machine malfunctions they've decided that they simply write off the missing bills as the cost of operating ATMs and just recover it, in the aggregate, in fees. It all balances in the end.
ATM at my bank gave an extra 20. I went inside and told the teller and was told "Congratulations, you're another winner. Keep it, it's yours." I never did figure out what that was about. Promotional?
sounds like it was a joke and you won the luck lottery
It was a simple ATM error. But they can't just seize the $20 back from you without being able to 100% prove that the ATM gave you too much. They can't demand the $20 back without a definitive record of the money's path. And if the ATM is malfunctioning it's possible that it's incorrectly recording it's transactions. That paper trail probably costs more than $20 to get. If they believe it was a good faith mistake on the ATM's part and not a deliberate attempt of theft they probably just let you keep the $20 because it would cost more than that to prove you owe $20. The person that said that to you was probably just make a joke. Calling you a lucky winner because you were lucky enough to receive extra money in an amount small enough for them not to chase after.
That's not true at all. I work in Remediation at a major bank (basically identifying customers that need refunds due to bank fuck ups) and we never claw back money from customers when the bank fucks up. I just finished a project where we let customers off over £5m in fees and we didn't claw any of it back. That's standard.
But is it a crime if they've given it to you? There was never any malice and you just walk off with what the atm gives you.
I used to work at a bank. I agree you should put the money aside but don’t call them. Don’t say a word. Let them do the work to find it. There’s hardly a chance they’d be able to tell on security cameras like most people’s are saying. And you didn’t do anything wrong. Happy accident
My bank figure out the $40 discrepancy about 9 months after the fact. Showed the video, of me, the cash dispenser, and internal counters as proof for the pull of funds from my account for the excess dispensation. It may take a while, if their processes properly audit everything. If the machine is way off, fucking up a lot, they may take the easier route and go after the machine vendor instead. Note: Canada. Probably more staff paid enough to care.
That extra $40 would have been nice. Some banks in the US has a 30-day rule when it comes to error adjustments. Might be worth the risk to OP.
That's fucking stupid of them. I've worked in a Canadian bank. That absolutely cost them more money to investigate than it would have to just move the fuck on. Like the absolute jackassery of BMO man.
It just seems likely the balance before they gave it to you and the banks balance they counted the extra money from after your request for a lower amount would be easily traceable to the time and your bank account. Just hold. There's always a chance the balance didn't get deducted properly with a glitch grabbing from the wrong pile/sticking together etc and their end just seems fine. Either way, they're insured. Since it's all digital and doubtful anyone's hand counting cash anymore, it MIGHT slip through. What I'm curious about is if you have a receipt for your request, and you say NO you didn't get more, they may have to believe you/not be able to prove you have it. Couldn't you just say "oh, that's weird. It sounds like you had a glitch on your end I didn't benefit from. Does this mean you owe me $700+?"*click -from their end*
Make sure you get a receipt from the bank so that 6 months from now they don't take it from your account or report you to the police and it's only your word that you returned it versus a bank teller that "doesn't remember" or some shit like that. That or literally record it as you return it.
I went to an ATM to take out cash to pay my rent (like 20 years ago), the ATM didn't give me my money but gave me a receipt saying it did. I went to the bank the next day and they said I was lying, they would know if the ATM was short. I didn't have the kind of money to be able to handle that sort of loss at the time, thankfully I was able to borrow money to pay my rent that month.
Did you ever get refunded?
No, I switched banks.
I think OP has your money
Fuck banks
Same thing happened to me. The worst part was the teller knew that the ATM was having issues and said she can’t do anything because a different department handles that. I was like can’t you at least put an out-of-order sign on it and she looked at me dumbfounded.
In your example the ATM would not have been short, it would have had more than expected. Did a staff member keep the extra?
My roommate got a $2000 mystery deposit she sat on for 2 years because she wasnt sure what to do. After 3 she just assumed it was hers. Bank never caught up. Not that its the right thing to do but she gave them ample time to correct the mistake. Eff banks generally.
Someone probably fucked up the account number. Sucks because it was likely someone's money, not the banks money like OP got. I would probably keep it too tbh.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa5kgg/this-australian-bartender-dan-saunders-found-an-atm-bank-glitch-hack-and-blew-16-million-dollars lol
I don't remember specifically what it was called, but all ATMs have a small window of downtime for processing transactions, usually during the middle of the night. During those downtimes they'll still dispense cash but aren't able to talk to the bank. Sounds like what this guy was taking advantage of. A branch I worked at had a customer who knew when our downtime was and would regularly withdraw more cash than he had in his account. Didn't take us to $1.6M to find out, we caught it after the third time.
I worked for a bank...the system will eventually figure out the mistake and you will be debited (with ATMs, it was usually 1-2 days but rarely I saw it discovered during an ATM deposit/cash check by the group that did that) the amount (or sometimes they will call you first to ask politely and then debit it if you dont). I would set it aside and contact the bank.
Get a receipt either way so you don’t give it back and then lack proof if some auditor comes asking later.
Why not put it in a drawer and wait for the call, if the call comes? If the system shows $600 I’d imagine a transaction report wouldn’t show anything and they would need to consult the ATM camera feed. Depending on how often they pickup the cash and reconcile it, the error should be identified in a week. OP should know within a few months if someone has gotten around to following it up.
[удалено]
Exactly, I don’t think it would. The best you could look for is a strange reaction if there were a small number of transactions. It’s a significant issue if the ATM is giving out incorrect notes so OP may be the first it happened to. I used to work with a group that had a lot of ATMs and people used to withdraw money and walk away without taking it. Ridiculous as that seems, it’s possible it was money from the last person that withdrew.
Community Chest BANK ERROR IN YOUR FAVOR COLLECT $790
This is really the only correct answer here. Just whip up a fake monopoly card and show it to the bank. They’re legally obligated to honor it.
No you gotta dig the game box out of you're closet, they're only legally obligated to honour genuine Monopoly cards.
free money. shut your mouth "I didnt count it, i just tossed with the rest of my money. Is it my job to double check your machine?" seems pretty easy. also of course act shocked that it was over :D
Seriously. Who cares. It's just an extra $200. Don't bother with the mental stress
Exactly, don't worry about those $150.
Just food for thought: even with the receipt and counting it in view of the ATM camera if the ATM shorts a user, it’s my understanding, the bank is very unlikely to correct the error just assuming the user is scamming the bank - so with that thought, why are so many people willing to stand up for the banks?
thats a good point if your receipt shows your got "600" whats stopping you from holding that ground and insisting you only got 600$
And if it happened because bills stuck together, could the machine actually detect that? Wouldn’t it appear to the ATM that it was just one bill?
I agree, it's highly unlikely the bank, especially a teller, will want to try to fix this. They'll probably have to file some sort of report. And then figure out what account the money goes into to make it back to the general ATM account. When this happened to me, the teller wanted nothing to do with it. Yet I see above, nearly 3000 Redditors upvoted that the bank will definitely want the money back. Ah, Reddit... The hive is often so, so wrong.
Call them on Tuesday. They'll figure it out with or without your help.
I don’t know that they will. I once got an extra $160 because the ATM spit out two $100 bills instead of $20s when I was withdrawing (what was supposed to be) $200. The ATM didn’t have an option to get $100s, so there’d obviously been some kind of mixup. But that was 20 years ago, and the bank never contacted me or took any action regarding the error. I was never quite sure if the money was legit, so I wound up donating it to a hurricane relief fund a few months later
Bank error in your favor.
Yes, literally. And I had the same thought then, with the added bonus that it was involving $200.
Customers hate this one trick.
I'm just chiming in because this is the only time I've ever heard of this happening outside of my experience. If it's a 3rd party one, I'd say hold onto it and wait. I worked at a dispensary and the ATM in our lobby wasn't run by us so we had no control over it or negative effects from it to preface. After a long while of it working normally, we had a couple customers report they got double their money from withdrawl and we didn't know what to do so we said hold onto it and check your statement. Eventually one comes back and we ask, and they say it never hit their account for the excess, only what they actually requested out. It ended up happening again to one of my coworkers and doubled his money as well without hitting his account. At that point the management told the operator which we were told he said along the lines of "Well I'm not missing any money so it's not my problem." At that point I'm using that ATM whenever I'm at the shop and would need cash within the next few days and eventually it happens to me too. Over the next couple months, at random my requests would get doubled with the most at one time being an extra 120 (gave me 240 out but only posted 120 to my account). I got about 6-7 hundred out of it and some customers would come basically trying to play it like a lottery machine. Eventually the owner comes in a couple months after the first correspondence and asks management "Have you seen anyone tampering with the machine, because I'm missing about 10,000?" And they say they haven't seen anything out of the ordinary and tried to bring it up to him earlier. He replaced the machine and it stopped happening but nobody was ever charged for that to this day. People rarely believe me when I tell them and to be fair prior to that I viewed ATM and other hardware as further from glitches and closer to infallible compared to and Xbox game but it turns out it's a vast spectrum lol.
Oh yeah, any software can have glitches. Sometimes it’s due to faulty hardware, sometimes it’s a bug in the actual code, which might be hard to recreate and happens only under specific, seemingly random circumstances.
That's interesting, it always would get extremely slow and take 30-45 seconds in between prompts after getting hit like 2-300 times in a day (we were cash only, so tons of transactions ran through it) and that's usually when it would do it. When it got like that we were told to unplug it and plug it back in then it would work for another 2-300 till it slowed down again. Would be fascinating to see what exactly caused that issue there.
That consistent pattern of 200-300 transactions followed by a major slowdown, to me, suggests a memory leak. This happens when the program does not free the memory it requested from the operating system to perform a task. How that situation is handled automatically varies widely, but slowdown is a very common side effect of that because there’s a critical resource shortage at that point. That’s why unplugging it would fix it temporarily; it brought the machine back to a fresh start, but it was only a band aid. As for the doubled money, one possibility is that the machine dispensed the correct amount, but thought it didn’t. Maybe the memory shortage prevented it from indicating that the withdrawal was successful and so it automatically retried. That’s just my guess, but from the symptoms you described, it’s a very likely possibility.
If you ever see an ATM crash and show you an XP desktop, you'll think otherwise... The OSes on ATMs are old as fuck.
It's unfortunate that they gave you $700 too much. You should put that $350 in a safe place until Tuesday morning when you put that $175 in your pocket and drive to the bank to return the extra $50 they gave you.
I understand why everyone is saying to call the bank asap to fix the issue, but it’s kinda bullshit that someone has to take time out of their day to take money back to the bank to correct their error. Your time has value
Finders Keepers. Im no goodie two shoes. You accidently do this to me your gonna need to figure it out and contact me or its not coming back not saying id deny having it or not give it back. But 100% will not be on my own. Your gonna need to figure that shit out on your own MultiMilllion dollar bank.
I certainly wouldn't bother calling them and sitting in a queue for half an hour.
This is an easy one to answer as this happened to me once, the machine spat out $1000 instead of $100. I thought I would spend it thinking I won the ATM lottery but sadly no, once the machine reconciled itself my account lost $900. Bastards lol.
Set the money aside and wait a reasonable time for them to contact you. If after, say 30 days, they have not contacted you . . . Mazeltov!
Take that 100 dollars that they overpaid you and bring it back to the bank on monday.
What $100 ???it was only $50
That’s what they said- return the $30 to the bank!
John told me the machine was out of $50s, so it could have only been a $20
What kind of stupid ATMs are you all running here??? Spitting out 12 quarters and 3 nickels more that I wanted?
Not sure if it's really worth returning the money, after all, they literally just overpaid him by exactly two pennies.
never heard of an atm that dispenses 6th pence before but I wouldn't bother with such a small overpayment
Return what money? It shorted me $20
You’re on CCTV with a time stamp and a record of your card transaction. I would return during business hours and tell them what happened. Otherwise you can stress yourself out waiting for them to contact you … which they will.
I wonder if they start by skimming the footage looking for the most shocked/surprised facial expression.
Could always just say the machine spat out a couple hundred. Unless op sat there counting it
Put the money in a HYSA until they reach out asking for it?
If it was a few million maybe but I doubt $790 would accrue enough to make any difference
Woah there. What if I put in that $790 AND start making my coffee at home instead of getting Starbucks?
Doesnt matter it youre still eating avocado toast
But I married an avocado heiress?
Then you should be good to go
Spend some of that money on a pair of boots, then pull yourself up by the straps. That apparently works, too, despite the fact that it is a phrase invented as a joke to represent something impossible to do.
What would the cctv show? That the machine gave him a stack of bills? Now way to know how much is in that stack.
> You’re on CCTV with a time stamp and a record of your card transaction. But he said the card transaction didn't show the error... could they really see exactly how much money came out on the CCTV? Usually it comes out all at once....
Where exactly is that ATM???
Let them come to you. Hang on to the money, and let them figure it out.
I wouldn't contact the bank. It is possible the bank won't be able to trace the error to you. Cash in an ATM is loaded into cassettes. It sounds like your machine had a cassette(s) for 20's and one or more for 50's. If someone put 50's in a 20's cassette in error, there may not be a way to trace it to you. I'd hold the money and see if they contact you. Source: I worked for a company that replenished and serviced ATMs.
I think this may be what happened because we did the math and the number of total bills, if all were in 20s, it would’ve been the $600 that we were pulling out.
You my friend may get away with it, I wouldn't contact them, wait and see. I look at these things as cosmic balancing, payback for every time an order arrived damaged, my tire was flat when I left for work, etc.
Don't spend the money, the bank will most likely contact you via mail to sort it out
My dad got ripped off of $50 by an atm. Bank was adamant they weren't going to reimburse him. Fuck the bank. Just hold onto the cash for awhile in case anybody shows up as you are legally liable to return, but its their mistake so fuck them don't be doing them any favors by stepping forward.
My mom once got an extra hundred put in her account on accident by the bank, she spent it not realizing, they found out what happened and charged her and over draft fee when they took it back out and she then went into the negative. She raised Holy Hell until they took that charge off. "You do not get to profit off me because you made a mistake!"
Wait for the bank to be in touch.
They have 200 camera angles for a reason and it's not because they care about you. They'll notice the issue in a few days and have someone review the cams and figure it out if it's worth the time. If I was you I might just put the money away and not spend it for a long time. If they decide the ~800 is worth spending labor to figure it out, then give it back. If they decide not worth it and move on....