Spending money wrongly credited to you

[anonymous-user]

Briefly...

• Friend's of the family run a small post office (not local to me)
• Woman paid £800 cash into her bank account
• Teller mistakenly enters sum as £8000
• Mistake spotted, bank and police told. Police aren't taking any action as the woman is now claiming she did pay in £8000. She's subsequently spent most of it.
• PO are expecting the £7200 to be paid by the friends

What can be done?

[anonymous-user]

Pothole said:

not really in the public interest to spend the time and money necessary to bring it to any sort of conclusion by the police.

That seems to be a common theme with the police

[anonymous-user]

jamei303 said:

speedyguy said:

That seems to be a common theme with the police

It would be wasting their time along these lines:

999 - Emergency which service?

- Police please

- Can you tell me what is the emergency?

- Hi I was charged £3.50 for some strawberries in Tesco instead of £2 and they won't give my £1.50 back

- Did you ask them?

- Yes they said I need the receipt but I don't have it. Can you arrest the store manager for theft please?

- ...

Hardly the same thing.

So, if you had £7200 stolen from you, you’d be happy for the Police to shrug it off, and leave you to it?

It’s a sad thing when such theft is so easily dismissed.

[anonymous-user]

Pothole said:

stuff

No thanks. I'd rather they utilised present resources better rather than just 'increase tax'.

Did you know mine and other people's money is finite and is not an endless tap ?

[anonymous-user]

The person is at risk of being investigated for retaining a wrongful credit, the problem being that if there’s no receipt and no cctv then there’s no proof. They could easily explain away 8k by saying it was saved at £10 a week over several years and when they realised it was such a large amount then they paid it in. One word against another.

The financial ombudsman more often than not uses balance of probability to sort out wrongful credits but that’s usually the other way around where you’ve deposited 8k but the bank credits £800.

The police could record a crime and investigate it I guess as it should come under the theft act. Getting a charge is another thing.

[anonymous-user]

captain_cynic said:

Psycho Warren said:

Surely a PO would have CCTV over the counter and cash area. 8k looks a lot different than 800.

The OP said it was "family run". Usually that's code for "as cheap and dodgy as possible".

Thanks for all the replies. As for the above comment, they aren't running it cheaply or nor are they up to anything dodgy. They are both in the late 60s, both straight as a die and have run businesses in the past. The mistake was made by an employee.

I don't have direct contact with them (they are my mum's friends) but I have put everything mentioned here on an email to them. My first question when told about it was 'Is there CCTV?'