£1.25m paid into man's account in error
A web designer from Barnsley found more than a million pounds in his bank account that shouldn't have been there - and had a ten-day battle to give the money back.
Kieran McKeefery, 21, logged on to his online bank account at the end of January to discover that his balance had been boosted by a mystery payment of £1,245,000.
"I checked my online banking and immediately I noticed I had £1.25 million in the bank. I was a bit fazed at first. It was such a copious amount of money to be in my bank," he told the Mirror.
"It was very strange and quite scary when you are in that position, checking your bank to see if £1.25 million is in there. I didn't know what to do, except just wait and think about all the things I could have spent it on."
Instead of splashing the cash, he phoned his bank, Natwest, and asked them to investigate. But all they could tell him was that the payment had been made by a large investment company, and that it was up to the company's bank to take the payment back.
"I was buying a new car the next day and I could have paid for it in cash - and bought quite a few more - with the money in my account. The bank wasn't really playing ball. It was a bit crazy really," he says.
"I had all this money in my account and they said they had made the request and I just had to wait. They said it was up to them to sort it."
It took ten days for the money to disappear from his account. There was no explanation, and no reward for Kieran's honesty - except the interest on the money, which amounted to a respectable £204.
"The interest was pretty good really and they haven't asked for it back," he says.
The £1.25 million is by no means the biggest payment to be made in error in the last year - that's surely the $92,233,720,368,547,800 paid into a Pennsylvania man's PayPal account last summer. In that case, though, the money wasn't around long enough for the recipient to consider spending it.
And that's got to be a good thing, because doing so is theft. Indeed, you're even breaking the law by failing to tell your bank if there's been a mistake, in an offence known as 'retaining wrongful credit'.
This time last year, we reported on the case of Michaela Hutchings, a 23-year-old mother from Lichfield in Staffordshire, who was accidentally credited with just over £52,000 by her local council. But instead of calling the bank, she went shopping, spending £9,000 in one trip to Birmingham's Bullring shopping centre.
Hutchings avoided jail, as the court decided she's been influenced by her boyfriend; but others haven't been so lucky. In 2007, a Blackburn woman who spent an accidental £135,000 credit was jailed for 10 months.
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