How’s this for a Christmas present?
You wake up on December 25, check your bank balance, and realize the number is much higher than you thought it would be.
That happened to roughly 2,000 people when the UK bank Santander put on their Santa hat and doled out $175 million erroneously to bank customers.
About those surprise funds for the people that received them, yeah, they can’t keep them.
The bank said they are going through what’s called the “bank error recovery process” and clawing back that money.
The payments were split over 75,000 transactions and were both regular and one-off payments that could have included supplier payments or wages.
Here’s part of the statement from the bank.
“We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts. None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result, and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”
The bank’s statement tries to make light of the situation and make it seem like a minor mistake, but there’s no question this was a hassle for many of their customers. Here’s what one payroll manager told the BBC.
“It ruined my holiday period because I thought I’d paid out hundreds of thousands in error — I thought I had done something wrong. I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work.”
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