Money for nothing… what would YOU do?
And once I’ve worked out which one it is (there’s one in Union Street which looks decidedly decrepit) all I have to do is quickly spend this month’s wages, get nicely overdrawn, and then the world’s my oyster.
I’ve been trying to put myself in the shoes of Joanne and Darren Jones, the couple who discovered their withdrawals from the hole in the wall were not showing up on their account.
In the next 88 days they made 300 visits and withdrew more than £60,000 from the faulty Waitrose cash machine in their home town.
This week a court heard it happened because the machine was very old and failed to record the transactions properly, so didn’t show people had taken more money out if they were already overdrawn.
The prosecutor said very few other people benefited from the free payouts because a majority of people in Billericay were not overdrawn. Yeah, right.
Is Billericay the one place in the country to be blessed with economic good health?
I’m thinking the Joneses were caught because they were particularly greedy. But I bet there are an awful lot of other people keeping very quiet. Isn’t it possible some people just didn’t notice that their overdraft was £50 or £100 better off than they’d guessed?
Or maybe, if others cottoned on, they were too scaredy cat to withdraw more than a little something for the weekend every now and again?
I had Radio 2 on in the car as I was driving around this week and there was the usual rabid phone-in discussion on the subject. Listeners were divided into two distinct camps — the bank haters and the goody two shoes.
The bank haters had all been playing too much Monopoly and really believed that card which says something like ‘bank errors in your favour — receive £50′.
The goody two shoes all insisted they would immediately have given the money back.
Personally, I’m not so sure what I would have done.
First of all I suspect I wouldn’t notice for a while. I don’t always use the same cash machine, and usually only take £50 out. And I know I should keep a running balance on my account, but I don’t.
It was different for Joanne Jones because she’s a banker herself (a team leader for the Northern Trust Bank in London, and lost her job after pleading guilty to the theft). Not only did she spot what was happening, but she realised why.
She had discovered in March last year the faulty cash machine paid out cash even though she was more than £1,000 overdrawn, and it did not appear on her HSBC statement.
She got her husband to help her withdraw more money using her account and a joint account, which had originally been in credit.
The couple were making daily visits to the cash machine and once took out £1,250 in just five minutes and £2,400 in 10 minutes on another day, the court heard.
If I noticed money wasn’t coming out of my account whenever I visited the cash machine at my local Co-op, I’d be in a terrible stew.
What if I told the bank? What if they discovered the mistake had been happening for years? How would I know how much money I’d taken out from that machine, if it’s not been showing up on my statements?
What if it was thousands? How would I pay them back? I’d lie awake at night sweating about losing the house, my job, the children. We’d all be doomed. The end of the world would be well nigh.
So would I own up, or keep quiet?
And if I kept quiet, just imagine the guilt and the torture. How tempting would it be to sneak back to that one magical money machine every now and again, just to see if it still worked?
Imagine the temptation when money’s tight at Christmas, for example. Or just before pay day when funds are low. How strong would you need to be to resist free money spewing out of a hole in the wall?
When I was discussing the moral dilemma, one friend suggested, as it was the bank’s mistake, the couple could have kept all the money in a savings account and then handed it back, minus the interest.
I laughed. What interest? At today’s rates that would have been about £1.23. And, technically, wouldn’t they still have been guilty of theft?
The judge said the Joneses lived a fairytale lifestyle with their money, buying designer clothes, staying at a luxury hotel and putting down a cash deposit for a Chrysler Crossfire sports car.
The detail of the court story which made me laugh was that the police also found £27,340 in cash in the couple’s kitchen, put into various envelopes, marked ‘holiday money’, ‘car money’, ‘clothes money’, ‘kitchen money’ and ‘baby money’. I suppose it made them feel slightly less criminal than ’stolen money’ or ’swag’.
I couldn’t work out why they put down a deposit on a car. I suppose they thought they’d draw attention to themselves by buying it outright, like the great train robbers.
And while we’re talking about banks and car loans, I must tell a story by way of warning to parents of teenagers.
Friends of mine went on a ski holiday recently, and while they were away their 19-year-old son walked into a car showroom and bought a £25,000 sports car on credit. Just like that.
They came back to find the shiny new white car on their driveway and had apoplexy because their son is only earning £400 to £600 a month washing dishes while he decides what to do with his life after A-levels.
The loan repayments on the car are £550 a month.
He’d gone in to discuss buying a second-hand car but had been convinced that a nice new one was a better deal.
Apparently, he had to produce no proof of earnings. And the salesman ticked a box on the credit agreement which said that his job was professional.
And because he’s over 18, he’s officially an adult (even though everybody knows teenagers’ brains are temporarily a hormonal mush).
My livid friends immediately marched son and car back to the showroom. And what has made them even more angry is the discovery that the usual cooling-off period on credit agreements does not apply if you sign while in the showroom.
Now the dealers say they want £2,000 because that’s how much the car has been devalued by being driven off the forecourt. My friends and their penniless son are in negotiations.
I’ve also learned that white cars are always the ones dealers can’t wait to shift. They show the dirt too much, and most sensible people want dark, metallic shades.