Tesco ATM dishes out 'free money'

There was an early Christmas present for shoppers in Manchester on Wednesday night - free money from a cashpoint machine.

The faulty ATM, outside a Tesco store in Fallowfield, started dishing out double the amounts that people were asking for at around 10pm. It kept it up for around an hour.

Customers quickly caught on, and there were soon enormous queues, especially once people started posting the news on social media.

A spokesperson for Tesco Bank says the machine has now run out of cash and hasn't yet been refilled - so there's no point running off there for a handout.

"We're putting right the error made by the cash machine and will have it up and running normally again as soon as possible," he told the Manchester Evening News.

It's not known exactly how the error occurred - although the machine appeared to have been handing out £20 notes instead of £10 notes, implying that it had simply been loaded with the wrong notes.

It's not the first time this has happened: four years ago, Clydesdale Bank ATMs in Glasgow and Wishaw also started dishing out £20 notes instead of £10 notes. Last year, a Lloyds Bank machine in Nottinghamshire did the same.
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But while most people would probably see the glitch as a stroke of luck, they aren't actually entitled to the money. If you take money 'with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it', it counts as theft.

If you can argue convincingly that you didn't notice the mistake, you may get away with it - although in this case that might be difficult given the scrum of people surrounding the machine at the time. Similarly, anybody going back for a second or third time could well be in trouble.

Generally, though, the banks either track the customers down and debit their accounts, or else take the hit on the chin - unless anybody's behaved particularly outrageously.

Back in 2003, for example, a number of Coventry Building Society ATMs mistakenly dispensed £850,000 to customers following a botched security upgrade.

But 12 people - including one family that pocketed £134,410 between them - were tracked down through electronic records and CCTV footage and prosecuted. Several were jailed, with terms of up to 15 months.