By Alexander Wilson-
A family from Louisiana accidentally deposited $50 billion into their account.Darren James, a real estate agent from Baton Rouge, first figured something was amiss when his panicked wife called him after checking her online banking, having spotted a deposit for a whopping $50 billion.
The 47-year-old father-of-two was wise with principle as he raised alarm upon observing the hefty sum in his account. He noticed the enormous deposit for himself on his wife’s phone after returning home from work.
Fox 11 reports initially thought the money was left he knew the money wasn’t really theirs to keep, and that they ‘couldn’t do anything with it’.
However, the former law enforcement officer for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety, didn’t even consider keeping the money, knowing this would be regarded as theft. And so he contacted Chase Bank, informing them of the error. Keeping any money wrongly credited to one’s account could lead to you being charged with a criminal offence of theft.
You could be guilty of an offence if a wrongful credit is made to your account and:
James said:
It was a great feeling while it was there to see that many zeroes in your account. It was pretty neat to see what it looked like.
“The thing that was most baffling was, we don’t even know where it came from,” James said. “We don’t know anybody with that kind of money.”
James went to the Chase branch and talked to bank officials about the mistake, and the error was reversed by Tuesday, WVLA reported.
The family took screenshots of the account to remember the once-in-a-lifetime error.
“I wasn’t going to keep it, no matter what,” James told the television station.
But for a few days, the family was in a much higher income bracket.
“We took screenshots to say, ‘Hey, look, we were were once — I guess — theoretically, in theory, billionaires,” James told WVLA.
Going forward, James hopes others will draw inspiration from his story, which he hopes will motivate them to do the right thing and think up ways to give back.
Considering what he would do if he was permitted to keep the money, James said he would have put it towards helping others, plans that would have included building a children’s hospital:
I would bless other people—to give people hope that there is positive in this world. That’s what my biggest dream is.
The deposit has since been reversed, but the James family haven’t been informed as to why exactly the error occurred, leading to concerns about the account having been potentially compromised. Chase Bank has yet to comment on the incident.
In April this year, another Louisiana resident was arrested after she refused to give back more than $1.2 million that had mistakenly been deposited into her brokerage account. Kelyn Spadoni, 33, was charged with theft valued at more than $25,000, bank fraud and the illegal transmission of monetary funds, CBS 47 reports. Her bail was set at $50,000.