Here's M's letter:

This is a strange one. Citibank keeps trying to foist hundreds of dollars on my wife. And not in a good Robert Redford-Demi Moore sort of way.

This was her go-to credit card for a while, since before we met. Around the time of our wedding last year, she charged a couple hundred bucks worth of gifts on what was an otherwise zero-balance card. She went to pay it off a few weeks later, but, lo and behold, it said *they* owed *us* a couple hundred bucks, after some magnificent benefactor credited our account with $600. High times in Fat City, right?

Well, being the mensch my wife is, she called Citibank and told them that somehow their Intertubes were crossed. They transferred her to the fraud department, which promised they'd look into it. Sure enough, a month or two later, we got a letter saying, "We're on to you, suckers, and we're taking our money back. Nice try, though." (I'm paraphrasing.) They debited our account and we went back to the drudgery and monotony of our lives.

Of course, Citibank, being the warm-hearted blokes we all know them to be, never uncrossed their Intertubes and kept wiring money into my wife's otherwise unused account. A few hundred bucks here, a few hundred there (always in even increments), eventually we had a balance over $1,000 in our favor. It was like the Hannukah miracle, except on a credit card.

So, sure enough, my wife calls back. Sure enough, she's transferred to the fraud department. Sure enough, they promise to look into it, and sure enough they eventually take their money back. And, this being consumerist, sure enough, they start depositing money into her account again. Always a couple hundred bucks, every few weeks.

What to do? "That's all well and good, we thought I mean, we don't use the card, so we figured we could live to ignore it and let them deal with it. "Ha ha," we'd say to our friends. "That crazy Citibank! Always trying to give us money. What will they think of next?"

Only as of today, they've started sending us CHECKS. Just today, I went down to our mailbox and found a fat, juicy check for $600, that said it represents the balance in our account. I mean, it's like they're SCREAMING at us: "TAKE OUR MONEY! YOU LOOK LIKE LOVELY PEOPLE! WE DON'T WANT IT!"

Only I can just as loudly hear, like, 800 Consumerist commenters tut-tutting, "You can't spend it. It's not your money. You are NOT lovely people; you're obviously scammers of some sort and you have this coming."

So the question is, what the hell do we do now? We've asked them, PLEADED with them to stop sending us money that doesn't belong to us. They're not listening. What now? How do we make them listen? What do we do with this check?

Save us, Consumerist; you're our only hope!

-M+C

Well, you clearly are not scammers. If you are, you are the worst scammers in the history of scams and you should go back to scam school and take scam 101.

We're going to be honest with you here and say we have no idea what you should do, other than you should not spend the money. This is what we have learned from several years of summarizing those "Bank makes $100,000 mistake, man spends it, and has life ruined" stories that show up every few months. Once the bank realizes what they are doing, they will want their money back.

If we were you, we'd start by writing an EECB to Citibank. Perhaps you can attract the attention of someone who realizes that, while, as a bank, they are supposed to loan money, it is supposed to be a bit more organized than this. Send them a detailed account of everything that has happened, and tell them to cut it out. (Keep a copy of this letter for your records, too.) It sounds like the "fraud" department might not be equipped to handle this sort of problem.

For more information about launching an EECB, click here. Here's some executive customer service contact info for Citibank.

Anyone out there have any advice for M & C?

(Photo: cmorran123 )

A retiree in Altoona, PA says that his bank told him he could spend the $280,276.76 that was mysteriously deposited in his account. He knew it wasn't his, but the bank assured him that everything was in order and he was free to start spending.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

His checking account with First Commonwealth Bank showed an Oct. 23 deposit of $280,276.76. The Altoona retiree said he knew the staggering amount of money didn't belong to him, or to his wife, Becky, so he called the bank — several times — to report the mistake, his attorney said.

Starbird's attorney said the bank assured his client more than once that everything was in order, that the deposit was accurate, that all was OK with his account. So, Starbird and his wife began to spend their unexpected windfall, thinking that an anonymous benefactor had given them an awesome gift of free money.

Yeah, not quite. Now the bank is suing Herbert Starbird, claiming that he never contacted the bank. By the time the bank noticed the error, Mr. Starbird and his wife had spent $163,330.37. The bank recovered $102,935.48 that remained in Starbird's checking account and took $14,010.91 from his savings account, according to the lawsuit. Starbird's lawyer says that his client has been trying to pay the bank back, but doesn't want to mortgage his house to do it and would like an interest free payment plan. The Tribune-Review says that the lawsuit shows Starbird has made two payments so far: $624.25, and $5,500.

Couple say they began spending after bank's OK [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review] (Thanks, Justin!)

(Photo: This Year's Love )

There is no way to retrieve the messages, photos and other attachments that were erased from inboxes and archive folders across the country on Monday, said Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the suburban St. Louis-based company.

"We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error," Lamont said Thursday when the company announced the gaff.

Cable Co. Empties 14,000 E-Mail Accounts [AP]

This same kind of problem has happened to one of our readers before. It turns out that an employee had inadvertently entered the SKU instead of the serial number on our Reader's XBOX. He was eventually able to prove that he hadn't switched the XBOXs, but Ben is having a much more difficult time.

Ben writes:

I am going through a terrible experience with game stop. After finally deciding to make the leap and purchase a PS3 I went to my local game stop in Queens, NY. After purchasing the 80 GB I drove home and eagerly took it out of the box. Much to my dismay I found the video and audio signal weren't working properly. I called the store and they said bring it back in. I went back to the store(less than an hour later) and they told me that they could not help me because the serial number on the box didn't match the one on the machine. Employee scam? WTF? So the say sorry, sorry, blah, blah, we are going to investigate this and review the cameras. Whatever. Who checks the serial number before they leave the store? Well apparently we all should. Now it's been over two weeks and I still have no answer from game stop or the manager...

Wow. I am screwed. So, the main customer service for gamestop has now told me that the district manager made his decision (unbeknownst to me) and they have to stand by his decision. This is to not help me in any way, shape, or form. So I figured good old Sony would help me, right? Well they also refuse to help me. Not only will they not exchange my machine, they refuse to even take it for repair because my serial # from the receipt doesn't match. I really don't care what my serial # is, I just want a PS3 that works properly for the 500 I spent. Any suggestions?

Ben

Does anyone else have any suggestions for Ben?

(Photo:Marike79)

The poor human who caused this error writes:

Adobe pushed out an upgrade of its Creative Suite. I installed it, as prompted. This is what happens when I try to run any element of the Suite after the install.

Click on the modal dialog box and the program closes. For extra redundancy, there's a second error message that reads "licensing for this product has stopped working." But I am impressed that I wasn't merely able to get the programs to fail, but that I got them to fail "catastrophically."

Adobe Creative Suite fails "catastrophically" thanks to DRM [BoingBoing]