We teach our children that if a bank makes a mistake, the money is yours. A roll of the dice on the Monopoly board game takes you to the Community Chest card. It reads: “Bank error in your favour. Collect £200”. Older versions of the cards picture a bank teller mistakenly handing cash to a top-hatted gent, who looks both gleeful and astonished at his good fortune.
In recent weeks we have revealed a much larger banking error, as £193,000 turned up in the account of a heavily indebted car mechanic in Cambridge. He was gleeful and astonished too; in his words “I thought: ‘Whoa! Bloody hell, whoopee.”
And who wouldn’t? Yes, lots of very decent people will instantly contact the bank, knowing the money isn’t their’s, and that they are not legally entitled to it. Lots more will think, hold on, maybe it is actually mine somehow … maybe the bank will never notice … and what about finders keepers … doesn’t that mean I can just keep it?
There’s an important difference between failing to hand back £193,000 in your account, and directly stealing it from the bank. In religious teaching, the first is a sin of omission, the second is a sin of commission. They are both sins. But the Catholic altar boy in me tells me I’d be given rather fewer Hail Marys for omitting rather than committing.
This business of money just landing in your account happens more than you think. I know of an accountant who saw £28,000 wrongly credited into the account of his son, an oil worker abroad, and the bank did not notice for 10 months. I know a shopkeeper whose business account was suddenly credited with heaps of small, individual payments obviously intended for another business account. Both handed the money back … eventually.
In each case, they knew the money wasn’t theirs. But they held on to it. I think we shut our eyes and imagine that the only loser is the bank, and they’re a rich, remote, corporate entity, not a real person.
But if you found £193,000 in a suitcase you would behave differently. You would know full well it belongs to someone, and possibly someone very dodgy. And if you have ever seen the 1994 film Shallow Grave, you’d know to high-tail it to the police station immediately.
Is poverty or debt a good reason to hold on to what is not yours? I’m humbled by the tale of Kevin Booth, a homeless man in a small town outside Seattle. This time last year, Booth was at the local food bank before it opened when he found a plastic bag full of $20 notes. He patiently waited to hand it in to the food bank when it opened. There was $17,000 (£13,000) in the bag.
“I felt like doing the right thing would be better than taking off with it,” he said. “It made me feel good.” He had been living on the streets for seven years.
Maybe some people think they can just get away with it. Two metal detectorists unearthed an astonishing hoard of Saxon and Celtic treasure in a Herefordshire field. They had not obtained permission from the land owner to search for treasure, and the law says they should have declared the find for the nation.
Finders really is not keepers. They were recently sentenced, many would say harshly, to ten years and eight and a half years respectively. Goodness knows what Lord Elgin should have got for those marbles.
If you have any residual doubts about “bank error in your favour”, consider the case of Sarah Jane Lee who in 2007 found £135,000 in her account. Unlike our car mechanic last week, she and her sister Amanda Moorcroft blew almost the lot, splashing out on a £10,000 Florida holiday and luxury items. Their bank, Abbey (now Santander) in Blackburn, didn’t spot the error for several weeks, but they did eventually catch them. They were charged with “retaining wrongful credit” and were sentenced to 12 months and 10 months respectively.
There are lessons to be learned from the curious case of the man who made a tiny sort code error, lost £193,000, and the man who received the cash. The technical lesson is that banks have woefully failed to sort out “confirmation of payee”, which would have prevented the error occurring in the first place. The legal lesson is that you are not entitled to money wrongfully credited to your account. The life lesson is that, whatever mental gymnastics you may go through to somehow think the money is yours, it’s not, and it’s really not worth the hassle trying to keep it.
