If a bank is going to give away $175 million (£130 million) to its customers by mistake, it might as well be on Christmas. Which is exactly what UK bank Santander did on December 25th, when they accidentally duplicated payments for around 2,000 customers.
From CNN:
The total payment was split over 75,000 transactions for around 2,000 corporate and commercial customers, Santander said in a statement published Thursday.
"We're sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts," reads the statement.
"None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days."
Santander blamed the duplicated payments on a scheduling issue, which the bank said was "quickly identified and rectified."
Santander is working to recover the funds from recipient banks through the "bank error recovery process," according to the statement, and it has processes in place to seek recovery of funds deposited in error directly from recipients.
But recovering the funds from recipients might not be easy — when US-based Citibank accidentally paid out $900 million to Revlon last year and tried to recover $500 million that hadn't been paid back, a US District Court judge ruled "that the bank won't be allowed to recover the money."
