Someone Transfers $917 To Man’s Bank Account, No One Will Tell Him Where It Came From

Here’s a change of pace: After seemingly countless stories of mysterious debits and charges on consumer’s accounts, here’s a story of a man who found that his checking account suddenly included $917 he knew didn’t belong to him.

“When looking at transactions online yesterday, we noticed there was a deposit of $917.11 from Capital One,” he explains to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Teresa Dixon Murray.

Trying to do the right thing and get this money back to where it was supposed to go, the man called his bank, Fifth Third. A customer service rep told him they could see the deposit, but couldn’t tell him the source.

The bank rep suggested he call Capital One, but that was a dead-end too. No one at the company could help him because he didn’t have an account of any sort or any information other than what little was given in his online statement.

After the Plain Dealer got involved and escalated the issue at Fifth Third, the origin story of the $917 came out.

Turns out that the man’s sister-in-law had accidentally transferred it to his checking account from her Cap One account. She had previously transferred funds to this account and it was still stored as a transfer option. So instead of transferring funds from her Cap One account to another account that belonged to her, she inadvertently moved the money to her brother-in-law.

Why couldn’t anyone have told him this to begin with?

A regional president for Fifth Third tells the Plain Dealer that he should not have had to get the media involved, that the rep he spoke with should have been able to provide him more information.

He advised that any customers faced with a similar problem ask to be escalated to speak to a supervisor or a manager.

What you shouldn’t do is spend money that you know isn’t yours, just because someone goofed and hasn’t noticed it yet.

“If money shows up in your checking account and it’s not yours, you should find out where it came from,” says the Fifth Third exec.

Fifth Third Bank customer finds $917 mysteriously deposited in his checking account and no one will tell him why: Money Matters [Cleveland.com]

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