Apparently they’re posting n’ah n’ah n’ahs on Facebook. . How dopey can you be. But NZ doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the PRC.

So maybe they got away with it.

I hear NZ law requires actual handling of the $ physically for a serious charge of theft, so the most they can be charged with is using an electronic device for unlawful purposes. Sounds like an old law needing modernisation!

The irreversible bit is where it depends what you spend your money on. Can the transaction be reversed easily? If so, it’s no skin off your nose to have to give it back to P.

However, you also have to show that the expenditure was in reliance on the payment. If it’s the kind of thing you would have spent your money on anyway, your expenditure can’t really be said to be specifically in reliance on the payment.

Also, of course, the reliance has to be reasonable – you can’t say, “Oh I never check where money in my bank account comes from” or something like that.

I’ve heard of a case where a person was overpaid pension or something like that – and when he checked with the authorities, they said, “Oh yeah, you’re entitled to it”. Then later (after he’d spent the money), they realised it was a mistaken payment and tried to get it back. It was tough titties for them – his reliance on the faith of the receipt was entirely reasonable in the circumstances! However, if he’d just accepted it without making inquiries, I’d suggest that his reliance wouldn’t be reasonable, and the payor ought to get it back.

I think your answer is bang on: “don’t be stupid”. If you don’t bother checking with the Bank about the source of the $, you can never safely claim complete innocence.

It’s much better not to get into trouble in the first place. And if in doubt – you should check. Otherwise it’s unlikely you will establish reasonable reliance or good faith.

Is that right? I doubt the end transaction has any relevance at all to the issue of repayment. While your honest intention means you did not commit a crime, nothing changes the civil remedy in the bank in requiring the money to be paid back.

I often cop this question, and usually answer – “don’t be stupid”. If you don’t bother checking with the Bank about the source of the $, you can never safely claim complete innocence.

The elements which turn behaviour into theft are (a) dishonest intention and (b) removing something I know doesn’t belong to me from the account. So if I know I’m not entitled to the $10M, but try and transfer it out of my account ASAP, then that’s when the theft occurs.

So, to answer your question If you woke up one morning and found 10m in your account and decided to take it and travel the world. would it be theft? Yes, it would be theft if you knew that it was a mistake on the bank’s behalf, and that it couldn’t possibly be intended for you, and dishonestly decided to take it anyway. I don’t usually give legal advice – but I’m going to break my rule and say: DON’T TAKE THAT MONEY IF IT HAPPENS TO YOU!

There’s a hard middle situation – say the bank accidentally transfers $1000 to my account twice. I don’t notice because I thought I was entitled to $1000 extra in stimulus money this month anyway, and I spend it. I was totally in good faith when I spent the extra $1000. It’s not theft because I didn’t have a dishonest intention to deprive the bank of money. I thought belonged to me. But should I be liable to pay it back? It depends what you spent the money on and how easily you can reverse the purchases you made.

Not sure why the public states all the obvious with these events … don’t they have processes to check these things?! … blah, blah … of course they have processes, good grief!

Trillions of transactions a year and only a handful of errors worthy of news cover. That’s hardly monumental incompetence or failure to have processes in place.

As with plane crashes or NASA disasters: if something goes badly wrong, it’s pretty much always human error.