By Santander accidentally gives away £130m on Christmas Day
Thousands of customers with Santander, a well-known bank, were surprised when they found an extra £130m in their accounts on Christmas Day.
Santander are now hurriedly trying to reclaim the money that was accidentally placed into 75,000 accounts.
According to The Times, their job is a difficult one as a large chunk of the money was given to accounts with different banks.
Reports indicate that 2,000 business accounts were paid twice.
The bank quickly reassured its clients that no money was taken from their accounts as part of the mistake.
A spokesperson for the bank said: “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.”
An anonymous payroll manager with Santander told the BBC: “It ruined my holiday period because I thought I’d paid out hundreds of thousands in error – I thought I had done something wrong.”
They claimed that the bank had not told them how to explain the second payment to the staff or how it should be dealt with.
An additional problem also came to light when considering those who may have already spent some of the money.
Returning it could mean that they will go into overdraft.
