A man was out late with his friends one ordinary
night, and needed to get some money from an ATM.
The machine didn’t respond like it normally
did, but it put the money into his hand.
After playing around a bit, he realized that he’d discovered a
glitch that could trick the bank into believing he had millions.
Over the course of six months, he spent as much as he could on a
crazy, lavish lifestyle—parties, private jets, islands,
and $1.6 million dollars later, the bank and the police still weren’t onto him.
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In February 2011, Dan Saunders, a 29-year-old bartender from
a small town in Australia, was out one night with his friends.
They were taking turns buying rounds and Dan
didn’t have quite enough money in his wallet.
He stepped out to go to the ATM around
the corner to take out some extra cash.
He tried to look up the balance on his savings account, and
the machine just said, “balance unavailable at this time”.
Dan then tried to see the balance on his credit
card, and the ATM didn’t give him that either.
Next, he tried to transfer $200 from his credit card to his
savings account and got a message reading “transaction cancelled”.
The ATM spat his card out.
Perplexed, Dan decided to try to withdraw $200 from his
savings to see what would happen, and finally got the money.
He headed back to the bar to pay for his round of drinks.
At the end of the night, Dan was heading home, walking past that same ATM.
The entire interaction from earlier had puzzled him,
so he put his card in again and started to play around.
He transferred another 200 and withdrew it, then
500, then 600, until he had almost 2000 dollars.
There was no record of the transaction.
A strange feeling hit Dan.
He felt powerful, like he had magic powers.
He could make the machine give him as much as he wanted.
It was like a dream—he thought it was a dream!
Yet when Dan woke up the next morning, the money
was very real and sitting right there next to him.
He figured that his account would be in debt,
and he’d have to pay the money back eventually.
But in the meantime, a thought struck him—why
not enjoy himself and have a really great week?
His first act was to buy a nice fridge for his home with his fiancée, who
was blissfully unaware of the magic money and would not have approved.
In fact, Dan didn’t tell anybody about what had happened.
It would take more transactions and fiddling
around to understand precisely what was going on.
Dan was correct about his account being in
debt, his savings was now down by two grand.
But he couldn’t stop remembering that powerful
feeling he had, and he went back to the ATM.
It was around the same time as before, late at night.
He tried to transfer 2000 from his credit to his
savings, and got a “transaction cancelled message”.
The machine spat out the card and Dan inserted
it again to get a balance on his savings.
The account was at zero.
Then he transferred 7000 dollars.
His balance went up by 7000 dollars.
Dan figured out that every night between 1 and 3 AM,
the ATMs of this one bank disconnected from the network.
That first night, when Dan was trying to transfer 200 dollars,
the machine wasn’t able to connect to the bank’s network to
check his credit limit, but it honoured the transaction anyway.
As long as Dan transferred money from his credit account to his
savings between 1 to 3 AM, he could get as much money as he wanted.
The bank would catch up to what happened the next day, so all Dan
had to do was stay one day ahead and keep transferring more money.
It wasn’t all just numbers either, he could
actually go in and take out the money as cash.
A few weeks later, he was deep into the scam and had
developed a gambling addiction at the pub where he worked.
His boss noticed something fishy going on
with the betting activity and fired Dan.
Hours later, he got a message from his fiancée that said,
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, but we’re over.”
That was the turning point.
Dan knew he would never be able to pay back the money spent so far.
So, he decided to go all in.
He booked a train to Melbourne and checked into a premium five-star hotel.
Dan’s goal was to make each day better than the last.
He and his friends would go around in limos, book several hotel suites for
a huge party, and travel on a private jet to a private island near Bali.
They took over the resort for two days,
partying wildly without a care in the world.
Dan blew money on designer clothes, expensive
restaurants, escorts, and presidential hotel suites.
A girl asked him for money to go shopping, and he just gave it to her.
He paid for another person to live her dream of going to
Paris to learn French, covering everything, even tuition.
After six months, Dan had spent 1.6 million dollars.
And the bank had no idea—they would call to verify the purchases he made
for security, but never thought it was odd that he had that much money.
The clerks perked up when they saw his balance
and offered him a drink while he waited.
All because the machines failed to register the transactions
during the late hours when Dan did his transfers.
Everyone treated Dan differently.
People would go up to be around him because he was obviously
rich, and follow him around for the never-ending party.
He was living like a king, spending around 40,000
dollars a day at the height of his adventure.
But the dream couldn’t last forever.
What makes Dan’s case so interesting
is that the bank didn’t catch onto him.
In other instances of bank glitches, it was only
a matter of time before the culprit was caught.
In one instance in Detroit, a 55-year-old retired autoworker named Ronald
Page discovered an advantageous mistake with his Bank of America account.
Before, he had an average of only a 100 dollar balance.
But the mistake put his account into a “pay all” status,
which allowed him to take out unlimited overdrafts.
Ronald hit the casinos and went on a two-week gambling spree.
He withdrew amounts up to 500,000 dollars, and once played
blackjack for 24 to 36 hours straight without sleep.
Though he had some big wins, Ronald eventually lost
all the money to the casino—over 1.5 million dollars.
It was then that Bank of America placed a hold on his account.
The next time he tried to withdraw cash, it didn’t work.
The bank demanded to be repaid, and the case went to court, where
Ronald apologized and pleaded guilty to theft of bank funds.
He was sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to
repay Bank of America from his 2000 dollar monthly pension.
In another case in Turkey, two brothers, Recep and Emre
Gezek, stumbled onto a loophole in their mobile banking app.
The brothers, in their 20s, had no money in their shared account.
They selected the “investment account” option, which
was reserved for customers who did stock trading.
Due to a bug, the brothers had access to the account
and could withdraw as much cash as they wanted.
The app asked Emre to type the amount he wanted
to withdraw, and he wrote something in at random.
The next thing he knew, it was sent to his account.
He tried again and again, and it kept working.
Emre told his family about the glitch, and they
decided to pay the debts on everyone they knew.
He and Recep sent money to all their relatives who had debts.
They also bought cell phones and tried to buy a
luxury car, but their spending spree was cut short.
After only two days, a bank official called them to ask about
the 1 billion dollar fortune that had been transferred to them.
The brothers were arrested when police caught them
carrying heavy bags of money in broad daylight.
Going back to Dan’s case—if the police and
the bank weren’t onto him, then what happened?
It was actually Dan’s conscience that caught up to him first.
Though he was living like he didn’t have a care
in the world, he was actually very stressed.
His body started to shut down as he started
losing his balance and feeling pain in his chest.
A doctor took a look at him and said he was having an anxiety attack.
Dan didn’t know much about mental health and
just thanked the doctor and continued on.
But then the doorbell at his suite rang.
Dan knew in his heart that it was the cops finally arriving.
He’d had a dream about being caught, with a SWAT team kicking in the door.
His whole journey from that first night to now had been so
surreal and free of consequences, but it had to end at some point.
So when the doorbell rang, Dan actually felt at peace.
But it was just the maid offering him fresh towels.
He knew at this point that he couldn’t continue this
lifestyle, or he would end up dead or a fugitive.
Dan didn’t want to lose his family or go through the anxiety any longer.
So he simply stopped doing the transfers,
and all of the accounts went into debt.
A bank official called and asked him if he knew his
credit card was overdrawn by almost 800,000 dollars.
It was way over the credit limit on the
account, and the bank couldn’t figure it out.
Dan called the bank himself at one point to ask what would happen next.
A man told him that it was all over—they knew what he had
done, the police knew, and there would be severe consequences.
But then nothing happened for 10 months.
Dan contacted a lawyer, who told him to
just be quiet and not worry about it.
The lawyer knew that the bank was going to take the
loss and that they hadn’t actually contacted the police.
They didn’t want their clients and the public to know
that someone had successfully stolen so much from them,
and instead were sweeping the incident under the rug.
Dan heard nothing from the bank or the police.
Another year went by, and he was now seeing a
psychiatrist due to all the guilt and anxiety he had.
He came to the decision to turn himself in so he could move on.
Knowing that the bank didn’t want this to be public, Dan forced their hand
by doing a media tour in Australia and telling everyone about his story.
Once the whole country knew, action had to be taken.
Dan figured he was going to get nailed in court.
But strangely, it seemed like no one in the
court really understood what Dan had done.
Not the judge, or the prosecutor.
Everyone seemed to have blank looks, and the
bank provided minimal evidence of the theft.
Dan pled guilty and was sentenced to one year
in jail and 18 months of community service.
These days, Dan lives a regular life working as a bartender.
He’s much calmer now and understands himself better.
He doesn’t regret the experience, not even going to jail as it allowed him
to understand a part society that he didn’t know anything about before.
Out of all the known cases of ATM or banking loopholes,
Dan was the only one who could have gotten away with it.
He lived out his wildest fantasies and got a taste of
what life is like for the richest people in the world.
But it changed him and his relationships, and
hurt his mental, physical, and emotional health.
These types of glitches are uncommon, and more likely than
not, people will get caught quickly if they exploit one.
Dan’s was the longest and most successful case—that we know of.