<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by MileKing:
Awhile back I had a similar situation where my account was credited a sum of money in the hundreds of dollars. The money wasn't mine; it was clearly an error. You wouldn't believe the difficulty I had trying to give the money back! I spoke with multiple people at both the vendor who made the credit and my credit card company. They all insisted it was correct. Most of them didn't even want to investigate it! Finally, one of them told me they would look into in. At this point, I left it alone since I had spent more than enough time trying to give the $$ back. Six weeks later the error was corrected.</font>
This brings up an interesting point. I have no idea how this would work with a credit card account, as you never actually take possession of the non-deserved money, unless you actually pay your rightful charges in full and request a check for the credit balance. Absent that, the worst that could happen is that you have to pay back the money once the error is corrected.
But in the case of such an error being made to a checking account, if you knowingly withdraw the money that isn't yours, you can be put in jail, even if you had no hand in creating the error in the first place. The mere fact that you withdrew money from the bank that you knew wasn't yours constitues theft from the bank.
I'm not saying that I agree with this, but it's a fact. There are many documented cases of people taking out money that suddenly landed in their account due to a bank error, only to end up in jail.
I have no idea what would happen if someone were to make an honest effort to correct the mistake, get nowhere, eventually withdraw the money, then sometime later the bank figures out that it really was a mistake. I suppose that if you made a reasomable effort to resolve the issue, you could make a case that you attributed it to something that you were entitled to, even though for whatever reason you didn't know exactly why. After all, the bank should be experts at determining the validity of transactions, especially in the situation where you specifically bring to their attention a questionable deposit.
A few years ago, there was a case in the local news where someone had received a rebate check in the mail for something he had bought. There had been a data entry mistake made at the rebate company, and instead of the rebate being $2 or whatever, someone had keyed in his ZIP Code as the dollar amount. So, he ended up with a $98,xxx.00 check! He deposited it, withdrew the money when the deposit cleared, then disappeared. Shortly thereafter, the mistake was discovered by the rebate company, and the police were looking for him to lock him up for stealing $98,xxx from the bank. Even though he did nothing proactive to create this error, the fact that he knowingly deposited and took out money that didn't belong to him was a crime.