Many people dream of what they might do if a large amount of money were to fall in their laps by some miracle—winning the lottery, being named to inherit a family fortune—but not many people can say this has happened to them.
One woman on TikTok, Aprille (@epicaprille), has shared that she received enough money from her credit union through an erroneous wire transfer to not only buy multiple homes but also a car, before the days of online banking.
She says she was accidentally wired $50,000 by her former credit union in her 20s, and that she faced no penalties for the bank’s mistake. At the time, she received a paper slip in the mail showing confirmation of the wire transfer from her credit union.
@epicaprille Replying to @FEMME NOIRE ♬ original sound – Aprille | Feminine Energy Tips
“I stood there and I was frozen and I was like, ‘oh my god, somebody is trying to set me up,'” she says in the video. “I start running through my mind, like everyone who could possibly be like sending me this money.”
When she called the bank, she says she was told there was no mistake in the money being wired to her. She then consulted a lawyer who told her to report the wire transfer to her bank again, document it all, and not touch any of the money she was sent for 30 days.
“He told me to post it somewhere public, so I don’t know if it was like a newspaper or something to that effect,” she says. “He said, ‘If they don’t claim it, it’s yours.’ And that’s exactly what happened, the bank refused to admit that they made a mistake.”
However, it appears that she might not have been able to keep the funds for herself if this had happened more recently. According to a MarketWatch report, an 18-year-old was sentenced to 10 years of probation in 2015 for spending $31,000 that was mistakenly transferred to his account because he shared a name with the true recipient, and he was ordered to pay restitution.
In follow-up videos, she shares that she was eventually asked to return the money by the bank, but that she did not have to as they did not have any “grounds.” She says the bank did not follow its own policies for investigating the error and having the funds returned.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Aprille via Instagram direct message regarding the video.
While viewers did not receive a similar amount of money from their bank, multiple commenters shared that they had also experienced mistaken account transfers and other instances of money that did not belong to them being deposited into their account.
“Happened to me,” one commenter wrote. “I was transferred 16k. We got to keep 13 k. It was way later the bank noticed. We also tried to report it. They took back the little bit that was left.”
“I was living paycheck to paycheck a couple years ago and I was depositing like an 80 dollar check my sister wrote me for watching her kids and the bank accidentally put in 1,080 dollars,” another said. “I was so excited. I obviously didn’t touch it and they caught their mistake by the end of the day.”
“They randomly sent me $1500 I thought it was tax return. Used some & then when they realized they made a mistake me account was negative what I spent,” a third commented.
