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Chase customers become instant billionaires

A number of lucky Chase Bank customers have become billionaires overnight after a technical glitch dumped huge sums of money into their accounts.

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Chase customers become instant billionaires

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

A Louisana family briefly became the 25th richest people on earth after Chase deposited $50 billion into their checking account.

Talking about his windfall, Baton Rouge real-estate agent Darren James told Fox news: “I was a billionaire for four days. It was a cool feeling, even though you couldn’t do anything with it.

“We knew it wasn’t ours. We didn’t earn it, so we couldn’t do anything with it. We couldn’t spend it — that would be theft."

He claims to know of at least 150 other people who have been the beneficiaries of mystery deposits.

A Florida woman revealed how she found nearly $1 billion in her Chase account when she went to withdraw just $20 from an ATM — then struggled to get hold of anyone to help her return the cash.

For others, the experience has been more horrifying. Last month a shocked teen TikToker posted a screenshot of a Chase account statement showing that she was $50 billion in debt. Other social median users joined in with similar tales of woe.

Chase says the issue has now been resolved.

"We had a technical glitch over a week ago impacting a limited number of accounts,” a company spokesperson told Fox in a statement. “The issue has been resolved and those accounts are now showing accurate balances.”

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Comments: (3)

A Finextra member 

I have a solution that would prevent these types of financail transaction mistakes firm happening by requiring management sign offs using a biometric sign off on the movement of large sums of money.

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

I have a solution that would prevent these types of financial transaction mistakes from happening and it's by requiring management to cough up fines from their own pockets.

It's 2021, it's extremely lame for one of the largest banks in the world to let such technical glitches happen.

FINRA recenty fined RobinHood for, among other infractions, wrongly posting a 6-figure debit balance in a customer's account, who committed suicide when he saw the huge debt he owes on margin trading. 

I hope the regulator slaps a similar fine on JPMC for this snafu - and also that the fine is docked to the management's pay. 

Robert Burch

Robert Burch Consultant at Independent Consultant

Chase should at least pay interest on these sums to the people whose accounts were in error and, perhaps, double interest to those where the error was a negative amount. I make it about $136,000 a day at 0.1% on $50B

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