Commerce Bank accidentally deposited $5 million into Benjamin Lovell’s account. He spent $2 million of it and now he’s being charged with grand larceny.
Benjamin Lovell was arraigned Tuesday on grand larceny charges. The 48-year-old salesman said he tried to tell officials at Commerce Bank in December that he did not have a $5 million account.
Lovell said he was told it was his and he could withdraw the money.
Prosecutors said the bank — which advertises itself as America’s Most Convenient Bank — confused Lovell with a Benjamin Lovell who works for a property management company.
The lesser-funded Lovell gave away some of the withdrawn money and blew some of it on gifts, but lost much of it on bad investments, prosecutors said.
As much as this sucks, if your bank deposits someone else’s money in your account… don’t spend it. Really. It’s not yours.
NYC Bank Lets Wrong Man Withdraw $2M [SFGate] (Thanks, John!)
(Photo:piffy)
@SkyeBlue:
It’s the people who don’t think things through ahead of time who get screwed. Seeing “No Country For Old Men” got me to thinking about illegal windfalls.
I think he still has most of the money. He has it buried some where.
Wells Fargo last year accidently gave me a $2 million deposit into my checking out. I originally only deposited a $2000 check.
checking account*
@PeteRR: funny, it made me think, “Next time I get locked out of my flat: say hello to my leetle friend!”
And, “Poor, poor cows!”
@Eric1285:
@snoop-blog:
@bukz68:
Yup. Get it out of the country, and promptly follow it. Hopefully his passport’s in order. Open an account at Credit Suisse Geneve, wire the money there, then bounce it around a couple banks in the Caymans, then back to Switzerland. Probably should break it into a few pieces when doing this. 4 million to bank 1, then 750k to four more banks, then 500k from each of those to another centralized account. After a week, do the same thing with the remaining million at the original bank. All of the bankss involved should be happy to have the money on their ledgers for ANY amount of time, let alone a couple days to a week, so they’d all probably be pretty obliging.
To the people suggesting the savings account to rack up the interest, in the link posted earlier about the guy deposting a $95K fake check, the bank made him return the interest he made on it, although it was with the same bank, so maybe if you moved it to a different bank, you’d get to keep it?
@friendlynerd: OMG! I just laughed at your comment!
Last week the Credit Union I am banking now, put my money ($3000.00 from a big proyect) into someone else’s account. I noticed that after reading the receipt and I saw a different name. What upsets me is that the clerk didn’t apologized nor said anything about her incompetence. Now I am skeptical!
re: Brazil. You need a visa to go there. And a passport to leave the country. Which most Americans don’t own.
@s0crates82:
And others regarding “flee the country”. First, you can’t get on a plane with millions in your carry on. You can’t check it. By what method and means are you going to “wire the money?” Bank X already knows Bank Y was scammed and you’re the guy. You can’t lug this around town for much longer. Safeway will let you send what – 10k in cash?
So you ride shotgun with a coyote’s return trip and make it to Mexico City -somehow your money stays intact and you move your money to these accounts. It’s the Caymens, Switzerland, or whatever James Bond scenario you have set up. By the way do you speak Spanish, French or Russian?
Now you’re living in Prague under the radar. What do you do? Yes DO. When you wake up. You go out for coffee, visit a museum, get a hooker. And the next day? The same thing? Yes – you’re bored out of your mind. Boy you wish you could go bowling with your English speaking bowling friends. Let’s say you do make a couple friends. It’s not 1950. News is global. If you haven’t blabbed about it probably read about you on CNN.com They have the internets in other countries. Now his shady friends know you have cash and want to to fund their god awful business ideas. Your friends aren’t friends anymore cuz you have money.
Meanwhile the bank has hired private security and investigators to track you down. Yes they’ll pay for those. Microsoft has teams all over the world busting software pirates. So you have a few apartments in a few different cities. Everyone is suspicious of you because you don’t do a damn thing all day and are always in and out. You wish the private investigators WOULD catch up with you just so your life would get a little exciting. Like in the Bourne Identity.
Then your parents get sick and or die. Do you have siblings to take care of that? Have you managed to send them any money via these arcane channels. Are you going to visit them? You can’t exactly clear customs in Detroit so do you fly to Toronto and take a dingy across Lake Huron? In February?
It’s fun to say “put the money offshore and go live in Brazil” – but logistically I’d think it’s a tad more complicated.
I wonder… If you stuck the $5 million in one of those high-interest savings accounts, had it there at interest calculation time, got the (in my account) $14,500 in interest, would they take back $5,000,000, or would they take back $5,014,500?
After all, you’re not spending a dime of the money, just keeping it until they can correct the error.
He should have taken the money out, put it in a high interest savings account that way when he found out the money wasnt his he could withdraw it and have lots of interest cash to keep.
@Eric1285: The kind of person who can afford to keep 5 million as uninvested cash isn’t too concerned about FDIC insurance.
I’ve heard any number of people joke about FDIC insurance, in that it’s a guarantee on the only financial account that they could lose without cringing.
@yesteryear: Not everybody checks all their accounts all the time. If you hit up my business account, I likely wouldn’t notice until the close of the quarter, unless you made something bounce. If you hit my investment accounts, I wouldn’t notice unless I decided to sell something, but I almost never sell. The only account I might notice it on is my checking account which (paradoxically enough) is the only account not worth robbing.
@jamesdenver:
In Mexico, nobody asks for ID and you pay cash for everything because most people don’t have checking accounts or debit cards.
I can name two towns off the top of my head that have a large enough gringo presence that you can get away with very little spanish. Most of the expats there are living off of savings or trust funds. You can fit right in. $5 million is enough for 10 people to live comfortably. For years.
Stealing is wrong.
But why is it that every other year there’s a bank that insists “that money is yours”. Seriously, anyone working at a bank who’s told $5mil or whatever isn’t that person’s money, get it in writing, say “Yes Sir, we’ll take that money away right now”, and when you finally figure out whose money it is, if it was the one who complained, it’s not like the bank could be blamed after getting a statement that it’s not theirs.
So if they insisted it’s his (you DID get it in writing, right???) that’s a heck of a gift but you CAN think that a gift belongs to you (be sure to pay taxes on it). Oh and this defense survives it being the other guy’s account since where they got the money to gift him is the bank’s problem, not his.
Of course if you think you’re $5 million richer you can afford to spend the first of it on an attorney to check things out. Also yes $2mil in investment losses in 2 months sounds more like Vegas.
I would have put the money in some kind of interest-bearing account. Worst came to worst the bank could reclaim the five million and they couldn’t say I didn’t help the rightful owner of the money since I didn’t spend it and merely tried to make interest off it. Interest on 5 mill can add up quickly even with crappy interest rates on savings.
@BugMeNot2:
I remember PSA commercials growing up that said something to the effect that if you recieve something in the mail that was unsolicited…. that you get to keep it. I rememeber the commercial had an eskimo that recieved a fan in the mail & was smiling because it was his now.
@dorkins:
That was my take on the situation.
@nursethalia:
But it does seem evil that THEY made the mistake by insisting “its yours” & then they turn around & stomp on you with larceny charges because you agreed with them & took it. It seems as if they are taking out their anger (at their own embarrassment for screwing up so BADLY) on someone else.
Its like someone handing me 5,000 dollars because they think I am someone else & then running to the cops to say I stole it.
@jamesdenver:
Noone thinks it will be easy, You’d have to be smart about it.
You could always leave the money with a trusted friend who gets a share for converting the money into something more easily smuggled out of the country (diamonds for example). You could always buy a boat & then conceal the cash inside (it could be quite hard for the coast guard or other agency to find paper currency well hidden on a boat as they mostly look for drugs… not just cash). Then sail that boat to your destination. You could also invite your friend along to be your partner & use him as the shield for everyday things. Not getting noticed is of utmost importance. You can live a simple life in a community & then go elsewhere to “live it up & have fun” & then come back to tyour simple life. You would also eventually adapt to your new surroundings. You may have to move a few times. You know… there is an irish-american gangster right now on the run posing as a tourist in europe ( I think this is him …. [www.fbi.gov] ). He has plenty of money, wanted by the FBI & he still hasnt been caught. If HE … a notoriously wanted man can do it…. I am sure some nobody (with millions) can. The authorities arent going to plaster your face around the world for being a nonviolent criminal & only taking 5 million. Heck I never even heard about the irish-american mobster until years after he took off to escape authorities.
Right now… in my current life. I’d be willing to take the chance to do this.
Maybe I’d convert the $$$ into diamonds & smuggle them out that way. Its much easier to smuggle out diamonds than it is piles of cash. Heck! for fun i may even dress as an elvis impersonator & have the diamonds made into a glittery (seemingly)rhinestone-festooned outfit! lol That’d be a caper! Wouldnt it?
@AD8BC: Great to to see a link to the $95k check guy- I was hunting the story a couple of weeks ago…
@forgottenpassword:
“@BugMeNot2:
I remember PSA commercials growing up that said something to the effect that if you recieve something in the mail that was unsolicited…. that you get to keep it. I rememeber the commercial had an eskimo that recieved a fan in the mail & was smiling because it was his now.”
That is if you receive something unsolicited, not if you receive something erroneously. It still has to be addressed to you. The point of the “keep unsolicited items” policy is to keep businesses that apparently have your scruples from sending out items to people then trying to force them to pay for it. It has nothing to do with you accidentally getting your neighbor’s, or someone else’s, mail and deciding to keep it, which is, yes, a felony. This is why most unsolicited is addressed to “$person or Current Occupant”. If it were just to $person, it would legally (though not realistically) require being returned to sender.
However, I’m not really sure why I’m bothering to reply to you, becauase, after reading your responses in this thread and a few others, you’re not the type who wishes to actually discuss things. You merely wish to justify your reprehensible behavior.
Oh Monopoly.. you really taught me nothing! Apparently the “Bank Error in Your Favor Collect $10″ was a lie.
@SkyeBlue: you saved me some typing. he should have wired the money to an account outside the US, gotten a 10 year passport and retired to the Philippines. No way he woulda gotten caught there (if he played it smart) and with that kind of moolah he’d have lived out the remainder of his days as a king. A real king! With 100 wives, 200 concubines, the whole deal. Now he faces notoriety and possible jail time. Damn shame.
@muddgirl:
If the bank says “This is really your money,” it doesn’t matter if he knows it was a mistake. The bank is telling him that he is WRONG, and that it is NOT a mistake. Since he is not the one controlling the money, who does he believe?
If you’re questioned by the police in a murder investigation (we’ll go with vehicular homicide here, since that’s the only case I can think of where this analogy would work) and you *know* that you ran over the guy and you *think* that you’re the one who killed him, but the forensic investigation determines that the man died a few hours earlier, do you argue with them until you’re arrested, or do you trust that the authorities are right in letting you go?
Same thing here. The bank is the authority and the bank is telling him that it is deciding in his favor. Does he argue with them until they take the money away, regardless of whether or not it really is a mistake? Or does he assume that the bank, being the controller of the account, is right?
——–
Further, to everyone claiming account mistakes based on names… names are never used to identify account holders. This is why banks use social security numbers as identifiers. They are unique across a generation.
@jamesdenver:
Except that the “offshore” and “Swiss” banks that people refer to are known for giving the US the finger whenever information is requested.
Credit-Suisse is going to hand over the cash. LBT or Julius Baer are going to ask them what the hell they’re talking about and demand that any legal action be run through InterPol, BIS, and any number of other international agencies.
@RvLeshrac:
But Credit-Suisse won’t hand it over immediately, and even if they do, remember, it should be a staged system with multiple transfers and multiple destinations, preferably with many transcontinental routes.
Credit-Suisse may be compliant with handing over what they’ve got, but once you begin dealing with the transactions occurring from numbered-account at bank X to numbered-account at bank Y, it starts getting complicated.
forgottenpassword has a point with the conversion to durable goods or hard-currency. When chunks of the money have arrived, it may be wise to convert some to cash and store it that way and keep it liquid. You won’t be earning interest on it, but if it’s somewhere safe and anonymous, then it’s not going to get confiscated either.
PeteRR is dead on as well. Who says you need to act like you’re jet-set as soon as you abscond? what’s wrong with living quietly and comfortably somewhere off the beaten path for awhile?
Besides, let’s say you do get this kind of opportunity – and you are willing to play it out all the way, would you really try to keep doing what you were before you ran? If you’re a tax attorney, are you going to try to do that again after you’ve ran? Or would you consider setting up a small furniture shop in a country town and never really worrying if your hand carved chairs sell or not.