Wire Transfer: Fill & Download for Free

This happened to me.About 28 years ago I went to deposit my paycheck. It was about $500. I had $80 or so in the bank, I was sure, but just to validate, I asked for an account balance.The teller smiled at me. “Sure,” she said. “After the wire transfer you received yesterday, and your deposit today, your balance is now $1,100,584.”“Ummmm, what did you say?” The teller repeated the amount.“Yesterday you received a wire transfer for $1.1 million dollars. Lucky you.” She smiled again.I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said, “That can’t be my money. Can you please double check?” She nodded and walked over to the branch manager’s office. She returned about ten minutes later.“Oh there was no error. The amount was wired from X bank to your account, and all the info is correct on the transfer form.”“So let me ask you something. If I asked you to withdraw $500,000 in cash right now, you would actually give it to me?”“Well no…” I nodded, knowing that something wasn’t kosher. “…it would take about 3 hours. We don’t keep that much cash on hand. What denominations would you like?”I stood there like an idiot. “I would like to take out $100 please.”I went home slightly dazed. The next morning, after a night spent wondering what I would do with the money, I received a call from the bank. It was the branch manager.“Yes, Mr. Kaufmann, sorry to bother you. I need to inform you that there was an error in a bank wire transfer to your account. You had 1.1 million dollars deposited into your account. I hope you don’t mind, but we will return the funds to the sending bank.”“No problem,” I said, “I knew it was a mistake.”The money was removed that day.That evening, I could not help but ask myself what if I had said, “no.”Probably exactly the same thing. But it’s fun to think about.C.

By “win” I’ll take it to mean “achieve my client’s objective.”My individual client made an erroneous wire transfer of a rather substantial sum to a local bank. Notwithstanding repeated requests, and the bank’s acknowledgement that the wire transfer was received by it in error, the bank refused to reverse the transfer.The client came to me for help. It just so happened that the very same bank had recently sued a local celebrity for failure to return funds received by the celebrity from the bank by way of, you guessed it, an erroneous wire transfer! The bank had also gone so far as to swear out a criminal complaint against the celebrity, much to her embarrassment. This particular dispute was widely known and followed by the local populace.While the client was in my office, I called counsel for the bank, an attorney I knew from law school. I asked if he might intervene to reverse my client’s erroneous wire transfer and he declined. I then suggested that the bank was acting in the same way as the local celebrity whom it had sued and embarrassed.I was told the situations were different. I responded by saying that the local media might think otherwise and that my next call was going to be the local newspaper and television station to ask them to investigate what I believed to be the bank’s hypocritical position. Much consternation ensued.“Don’t do that until I get back to you!” he shouted. Five minutes later, while my client was still in my office, the phone rang. It was bank’s counsel. “Where shall we send your client’s funds? We propose to do so today.”Problem solved.

We once had a customer that sent our wires 2–3 times a week in amounts ranging from 25k to 60k. He became very knowledgeable about the process and the timing of the withdrawals. So on a Friday after 4p he came to the bank and requested a wire transfer for 55k. He only had about 56k in his account. On Saturday he went to another branch and requested another 50k wire transfer. He knew that the system wouldn’t show a pending wire because he sent the first wire after 3p.Because of a system flaw both transactions were approved. On Monday both transactions hit his account resulting in a negative 49k balance.Nobody was fired because everyone followed protocol, but a system change and the wire protocol changes immediately.The bank filed a lawsuit against the guy, but he was long gone