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Photo: DPA

Bank gives €200 million to man by mistake

Published: 2 Mar 12 10:09 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120302-41101.html

A west-German man became an overnight multi-millionaire recently when his bank transferred €200 million to his account. Half a day later they demanded it back – with interest.

Staff at the north German online bank removed €12,000 in interest from the man, who said he will be suing the company to have this sum returned, daily newspaper Die Welt reported.

"An amount of money that was clearly too large was transferred due to a technical malfunction," a spokesman from the bank said.

But the surprised recipient, who lived in Hessen, couldn’t resist the temptation and transferred €10 million to his checking account at his regular bank.

But the newly minted millionaire only had twelve hours to rejoice as the bank realised its mistake and demanded the money back – with €12,000 or 14.4 percent interest.

Legal precedent seems to be in favor of the unexpected millionaire, as in a similar case previously judges at the Federal Court of Justice found that accessing the money transferred accidentally by a bank is not a criminal act.

The bank customer is not legally required to inform the bank of its mistake, as accessing money that was erroneously transferred is simply taking advantage of a given situation, the court ruled.

The Hessen state court is to decide whether he gets the money back or not on May 3.

The Local/mw

What do you think? Leave your comment below.


Your comments about this article:

11:43 March 2, 2012 by pepsionice
There's a great movie script here....some guy who finds the 200 million....asks his pub buddies what to do....rushes off to Switzerland to open an account ....transfers the money out of the country the next morning....then removes the money to hide out.
16:00 March 2, 2012 by raandy
He knew for sure it was not his money. The only problem is that he moved 10 million into his personell checking account. I would think the bank would be satisfied to have the money back and drop the interest billing as he did not steal it and the mistake was the banks.
17:30 March 2, 2012 by sc123
i would of definitely taken a road-trip to Switzerland immediately!
19:58 March 2, 2012 by Englishted
14.4% interest per day ,what is the name of the bank?

I bet they would not give that interest out no matter how much you put into a account.

Hope he beats the greedy bankers and the name comes out just to shame them.
21:05 March 2, 2012 by Pakistani
no one could need those 10 mil like I do. just got a broken leg..........am disabled for 2 more months...........mama "deutschland" was very cool about extorting 50 euros per month form my student job (570/month)....but now that I want some help, I have no where to look forward to.................. If those 10 mills were in my checking account , I would have drawn them and would have ran ON my broken leg out of germany just to make a point out of it..........................
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