Coketalk! please help. The bank screwed up and I dont know if I should reap the benefits. I exchanged $1,300 US dollars into another country’s currency (cash!), BUT they have neglected to deduct it from my bank account. Its been a week now, and they still haven’t caught it. Do I keep it (I am a broke, unemployed recent graduate hoping to find work overseas) or call them and inform them of their error? I KNOW its wrong, but after 3 months of frivolous job searching, I can’t quite get myself to dial the bank’s phone number and tell ‘em whats up.

Fuck the banks. They caused this recession. You don’t owe them a god damned thing, much less a call to inform them of their error in your favor. Let those faceless corporate leviathans catch their own mistakes for a change.

Then again, don’t spend the money. It’s not yours.

Not yet.

Just let it sit there. It’s only been a week, after all. At any point in the next month, the money could simply be swept from your account and that would be that.

If the balance remains after a month, you can be pretty sure that it’s an actual error and not just slow process. Still, don’t spend the money. It’s not yours.

Not yet.

At this point, you’re dealing with a good old fashioned bank error resulting in undue enrichment. Who knows? The transaction involved foreign currency, so it may not even be your financial institution that took the hit.

If someone catches the error after a couple of months, they’ll sweep the money out of your account and you’ll probably get a letter of incident as a matter of courtesy from a low-level drone in some department of supervision. So again, don’t spend the money. It’s not yours.

Not yet.

I know, you’ve been patient. It’s been six months already, and the balance is still just sitting there. You’re 99% sure that they’ll never discover the error, and you’ve even stopped thinking of it as the bank’s money. You don’t quite feel that it’s yours, but you’re starting to think of it as a reserve fund in case of an emergency. That’s fine, but still, don’t spend the money. It’s not quite yours.

Not yet.