“Thousands of people received a surprise gift on Christmas Day this year,” reports CNBC, “when European bank Santander accidentally deposited £130 million ($176 million) across 75,000 transactions.”
The mistake happened when payments from 2,000 business accounts in the U.K. were processed twice, meaning some employees saw their wages double, while suppliers also got more than they were expecting.
The bank said the duplicate payments were caused by a “scheduling issue” that has now been rectified. It is now trying to recuperate the mistaken payments, many of which have gone into bank accounts operated by rival banks. “We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” a Santander spokesperson told CNBC…
Santander said it also has the ability to recover the funds directly from people’s accounts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.