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Our ATM Is Broken, Go To Jail
Actually, I do RTFA writes "This community recently discussed possible criminal prosecution for people who took advantage of faulty slot machine software. At the time, many here drew an analogy to a hypothetical ATM that dispensed too much money. Well, apparently, that too may result in criminal charges. Although they suspect that someone may have tampered with the ATM, they are considering charging anyone who got extra money from it." Here is an editorial musing on the morality of such unexpected windfalls.
Mine only included a clause pertaining to bank or in transit errors: not deliberate deposits by the company.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Easy - Simply don't give them authority to do it. Deposits don't require authority. Withdrawls require a signed mandate on record from yourself. Or do banks in the US simply allow anyone who says so to take money out of your account?
A few states have laws (often improperly referred to as Good Samaritan laws, e.g. the finale of Seinfeld) that require you to provide assistance to victims of crimes/torts. However, these are the gross minority.
Almost every state places absolutely no burden on anyone to help anyone else, unless they have a pre-existing duty (e.g. you're their caretaker, parent, etc.).
"Stumble before you crawl"
That's a real dumb thing to do; every deposit over $9999.99 is subject to tax reporting.
You should report the incident immediately to the bank and the IRS. Otherwise, they will screw you to the wall for money laundering.
Interesting thing about banks. It's your gold, but they're the ones that have it...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
All those deposits of ($)9999.99 would look rather suspect in your bank account which I am sure would raise a few red flags
The whole point of my post was that no Federally significant flags go up until you break the six nines barrier.
Most banks give not a shit (and will actively avoid caring) if you serially deposit $9899.47 every night at 8:53 p.m. Nor do they have to report it to anyone.
However - if you start depositing $10,000.00 once a year, everyone starts paying attention to what you are doing, provided you weren't under suspicion already. It's relatively easy to get a warrant to monitor an account, but regular biweekly deposits just short of $10k don't raise an alarm. Otherwise, most of Silicon Valley's senior marketing folks would be under the Federal gun.
While I sympathise with your predicament, my experience is that the situation isn't that lopsided.
First of all, IANAL, so take this just as someone searching Wikipedia for you, with the usual caveats that means. I say that because I'll take a bit of a legal definitions detour, but that's not really that necessary to illustrate the _moral_ point I'm making, so feel free to skip it if you want to.
The key element in any conviction in the western law system is the "Mens Rea", or "evil intent". (Well, literally "evil mind".) There are various degrees of it, ranging from premeditation (you actually planned ahead to do harm) to negligence (a reasonable person of average intelligence should have seen how an otherwise well meant plan could go wrong and harm someone.) "Criminal negligence" is somewhat a misnomer, in that it's usually not criminally punished, unless it was "gross negligence", meaning it involved "wanton disregard for human life". I.e., unless an ATM was dangling from the ceiling and fell on you, it won't qualify as such.
You'll probably have no case at all, even civil, unless it's the previous degree, namely "Willful blindness". I.e., someone had more than ample warnings that something can go bad, or it was blindingly obvious that it will cause harm, but they choose to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Why I took that legal definitions detour is because it codifies the basic underlying moral idea: was it deliberate? Did that person _intend_ to do something wrong? Did they _know_ they did something wrong? Did they do anything to rectify the problem _if_ they became aware of it?
(Also, I don't know about the USA, but in Europe we have this clause that you can't keep an undeserved gain, even if it was an error. E.g., if you transferred some money to the wrong account by mistake, even if the recipient didn't know about it, they still have to give you your money back. That's another codifying a basic moral idea: money gotten by someone's error aren't yours to keep.)
And in that aspect, the bank doesn't seem guilty at all to me, and the situation isn't as equivalent as you paint it. Sorry.
1. The bank certainly didn't intend to rip you off there, and they _do_ correct it when they become aware of the problem.
1.a. I can assure you (well, second hand, because I have friends who worked for banks) that banking software is among the most tested and reviewed software ever made, ranking up there with the stuff they run in airplane control systems. Banks not only are more carefully monitored by the government, but also live by their reputation and face bigger money problems. Noone wants software who makes gross mistakes. And not just for little fish like you and me, but they also deal with massive corporate funds. Software which gets a brain-fart for a $100 transaction, well, you can see the problems it could cause when it does a $100,000,000 transfer for a takeover.
Most of the problems involving banks are human errors, like an absent-minded dolt putting a pack of $100 notes in the $10 tray of the ATM. And even those are very rare, actually.
1.b. At any rate, they _do_ fix the problem when they aware of it, and even offer assistance for your own problems, like when you entered the wrong sum or destination account. (As a personal anecdote, they sure have been nice and helpful when I typoed the sum I transferred to my insurance... by omitting the decimal point.)
And to get back to that moral point, you can't fault them for not automatically fixing something they don't even know about. So until you go tell them about it, wtf do you expect? Telepathy? By your own tale, you needed exactly _one_ trip to the bank to solve it, which doesn't seem that tragic.
2. By comparison the folks ripping off an ATMs and the like are not in the same category at all. You do count the money you get from the ATM, don't you? So you'd _know_ something went wrong. Plus there are cases where it's been deliberate by any reckoning. There are people who went back and took
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let me help this out here. I used to work for a bank. Deposits of significantly less than $10,000 are analysed by a group of people in virtually every bank. More notably, if these are frequent cash deposits of amounts even over $1,000... you're likely to be reported. Now days, virtually all transactions over $2,000 that aren't obvious things like paychecks are analyzed by people within the bank to determine if reporting to the IRS is necessary.