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Say I send an email money transfer (these are popular in Canada) to my friend.
The bank's software that handles email money transfers forgets to remove the money from my account. But still adds it to my friends.
He is not $100 richer. And I am no poorer. Because of a software glitch.
This is entirely plausible to me.
Does it happen? How do they catch it? What can it's (presumably negative) effects be on the currency as a whole?
By the way, am I correct in presuming you meant to write "he is NOW $100 richer"?The bank's software that handles email money transfers forgets to remove the money from my account. But still adds it to my friends.
He is not $100 richer. And I am no poorer. Because of a software glitch.
This is entirely plausible to me.
Does it happen? How do they catch it? What can it's (presumably negative) effects be on the currency as a whole?
You bet they'll catch it. Remember, what are bankers, really? They're accountants. And accountants live to make sure glitches like that don't happen. In accounting, every transaction is treated as a transfer from one account to another. It's called double-entry bookkeeping: every transaction has a debit entry in one account, and a credit entry in another account. At the end of the day, add up all the debits, add up all the credits. The amounts have to be the same.
Not true. Bankers lose money and make mistakes, and often don't catch them unless someone else does.
My grandfather found an extra 10k in his account one day. Being an honest guy, that or being afraid of getting into trouble (I think a bit of both actually), he went over to the bank manager and reported the mysterious 10k.
Their response was "Thank you so much, we were looking for that money, if you didn't come forward, i don't know if we ever would have found it".
Just because they make a mistake, doesn't mean they know where to look to catch it, what if the reason that they didn't take the 100 out of your account included losing the account number associated with the transaction? Finding where it should come from is not only a needle in a haystack... bankers, being accountants, also realize that its entirely possible to spend more time trying to find where some money went, than you lost in the first place.
