A Louisiana family had $50 billion accidentally deposited in their bank account, making them the 25th-richest people on Earth — for less than four days.
Baton Rouge real estate agent Darren James, 47, told Fox how he came home earlier this month and his shocked wife held up her bank balance info on her phone, telling him, “Look at this!”
“Open it up and we’ve got $50 billion in our account,” James said Sunday of the previous weekend’s apparent sudden riches.
“And all we were thinking was, ‘Who’s going to be knocking at our door?’ Because we don’t know anybody with that type of money,” he said.
He admits that he flirted with the idea that it may have been a “rich uncle” who left them the cash, which — if genuine — would have put them just above Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his family in the Forbes billionaires list.
“It was a great feeling while it was there, to see that many zeros in your account. I mean, I’m part of the one-comma club, not the three-comma club,” he laughed of usually having thousands, not billions.
James and his wife started calling Chase Bank as soon as they saw the cash there on Saturday, June 12, but the money remained there until some point on the following Tuesday.
“I was a billionaire for four days,” he told Fox. “It was a cool feeling, even though you couldn’t do anything with it,” he said.
“We knew it wasn’t ours. We didn’t earn it, so we couldn’t do anything with it. We couldn’t spend it — that would be theft,” said James, who used to work in law enforcement.
James said he heard as many as 150 other people across the US had mystery deposits at the same time, saying it has concerned them about the security of their account.
A Florida woman, Julia Yonkowski, of Largo, recently revealed how she found nearly $1 billion in her Chase account when she went to withdraw just $20 from an ATM — then struggled to get hold of anyone to help her return the cash.
Chase Bank told Fox that the issue with the Jameses’ balance has since been resolved.
“We had a technical glitch over a week ago impacting a limited number of accounts,” a company spokesperson told Fox in a statement.
“The issue has been resolved and those accounts are now showing accurate balances.”