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Santander Accidentally Pays Out £130 Million On Christmas Day

Santander Accidentally Pays Out £130 Million On Christmas Day

A whopping 75,000 people woke up on Christmas Day to find an unexpected Christmas bonus

Santander accidentally paid out £130 million to tens of thousands of accounts on Christmas Day - that’s really putting the ‘Santa’ into Santander, isn’t it?

The bank mistakenly deposited cash into 75,000 accounts belonging to people who were due to receive a payment from 2,000 companies that bank with Santander - the bank accidentally made the payments twice with the second payment coming from the bank’s own cash. 

Santander is now attempting to recover the lost funds but the job of clawing the cash back is made more difficult by the fact that many of the accounts the cash was paid into belong to rival banks, The Times reports

Alamy

Santander has already begun speaking to rival banks, including Barclays, HSBC and Co-operative Bank and told The Times those banks would ‘look to recover the money from their customers' accounts’.

Even though the bank was responsible for the mistake, it’s still illegal to keep any wrongly banked cash - so if you woke up to an extra windfall on 25 December, you’ll need to hand it back. 

Despite it being illegal to keep the money, some people may have already spent the cash. 

In a statement, a Santander spokesperson said: “We're sorry that due to a technical issue some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts.

“None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we are taking steps to recover the duplicated transactions in line with industry processes.”

Alamy

The spokesperson added: “The duplicated payments were the result of a scheduling issue, which we quickly identified and rectified. The recipients and purpose of payment will have varied among clients but could have included wages or supplier payments.”

The mistake likely cause chaos at payroll departments, with staff believing they were responsible for the mistake. 

One anonymous payroll manager told the BBC the whole incident had caused serious disruption to their Christmas and Boxing Day. 

They said: "It ruined my holiday period because I thought I'd paid out hundreds of thousands in error - I thought I had done something wrong.

"I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work."

The payroll manager said they hadn’t been told by Santander how staff should go about repaying it. 

They added: "It's just a complete shambles. How they are going to recover it, I just don't know."


Featured Image Credit: Alamy

Topics: UK News, Money