This story happened a few days ago in Ekaterinburg city, in Ural region in Russia. One man decided to add some money to his bank account via ATM. He went to the nearest one and put 2,000 roubles (around $74). The ATM took the money and returned him a slip. Here is the photo of that slip:

The amount on the slip was 2,006,699,00 RUR (around $7,430,000). He was astonished, he has got another slip – and still the amount was the same. So he decided to go the bank and tell them about the mistake ATM made.

He arrived to the bank and told a clerk his story, also showed a slip, but the clerk was not interested in the situation. “Many strange things happen buddy” told the clerk to the 2 billion roubles account holder, “Come back please some other time, I’ve got lot of things to do right now”.

The man got offended with such a response. He went straight to the nearest ATM and started withdrawing the cash. All the day he was going from one ATM to another withdrawing the daily limit of each one. Between the withdrawals he was again putting some more millions to his account in total his balance reached 20 billion roubles ($70 million).

All the money he put in big shoe boxes and afterwards took all those boxes and went again to that bank clerk. He rammed the box to the clerk desk. “What’s this? What are you doing?”, asked him the clerk. “It’s money. Millions of roubles”.

Clerk was really shocked. He called other bank workers and they all got greatly amazed by what they were presented. They took the money from the “magic” cardholder, told him “thank you” for his honest and unusual behavior, and he went home.

On the way home he again went to a nearest ATM and tried the trick. And again he has got 2 billion roubles available after his 2 thousand transfer. He again called the bank but nobody wanted to be in charge of this growing incident. Only a few hours later all the ATMs of this bank were turned off.

It’s a typical Russian incident from my point of view. I don’t think that in any other country bank workers could be so irresponsible, mistakes so huge buy amounts and poor people so honest.

This story was also published in Russian newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” and in some Russian blogs.