Source: tomch / Getty
Santander ain’t Saint Nick.
The Spanish owned banking institution just spoiled Christmas Day for the lucky few to receive a lump sum of money.
The bank accidently handed out $176 million into 75,000 different accounts on the lord’s day. Santander claims the error occurred because of a scheduling issue, which caused payments from 2,000 business accounts in the United Kingdom to be processed twice.
This would mean that some employees and suppliers would see their wages double. Those affected were first paid by their employer, and then secondly paid by Santander.
Of course, Santander had to make an official statement regarding the mistake.
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 will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.
Santander has not given any information about how business firms should explain the second payment to staff or about how it should be repaid. According to The Times, the bank has already gone into talks with rival banks on how to return that money back to the Santander safes.
Banks like Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money are supposedly looking into how to recover the money. Unfortunately for many, Santander has not made it clear on how the banks would respond if their customers had already spent the money, meaning returning it would push them into overdraft. This may force Santander to call people, who were blessed with money, directly.
If you thought receiving phone calls from Wells-Fargo were annoying, you might want to pray for the people who are going to receive phone calls from Santander.
Its going to be INCESSANT.
What would be your first purchase after a surprise check? Let us know in the comments.
