Santander UK is trying to recover about $175 million, or about 130
million pounds, that it accidentally paid tens of thousands of people on
Christmas Day.
About 75,000 people received the mistaken payments, including many customers of rival banks. Santander is seeking help from the other
banks to recoup the money, the bank said in a statement.
The mistaken deposits could look like normal payments to recipients
because they were duplicates of regular and one-off payments that about 2,000
of the bank’s commercial and corporate customers had already paid to people
including their suppliers and employees.
“We’re sorry that due to a
technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly
duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” the bank said. “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 U.K. to recover the duplicated transactions over the
coming days.”
To recoup the money, Santander UK has asked the banks where people
received the payments to help retrieve the money. Meanwhile it was also using
its own processes for recovering money that was paid in error. It was not clear
how the banks would deal with customers who had already spent the money.
Santander UK, the British arm of Banco Santander of Spain, has more than
14.4 million customers.
Last May, the bank apologized after a “technical
problem” left some customers unable to use banking services, including making
payments, for several hours.
It is rare for banks to deposit millions in error, but such mistakes can
be the most costly for those who receive the money by mistake.
In April last year, a USA 911 dispatcher was arrested on fraud and theft
charges after she bought a house and an S.U.V. using some of the $1.2 million
that the financial services company Charles Schwab had accidentally deposited
in her brokerage account.
In
February 2008, two sisters from Blackburn, England, were jailed after they spent
nearly £135,000 that a bank accidentally deposited in one of their accounts.
From The New York Times (edited)
