WENDY KNOWLER | Ignoring bank statements could be costly

What would you do if R90,000 appeared in your bank account, money you were not expecting and hadn’t earned — and nobody contacted you to ask for it back?

That’s just what happened to Gauteng business owner Mrs B in March 2021. Spoiler: she’s yet to pay it back.

According to her attorney, she claims to have queried the mystery deposit with her bank, Absa, which told her it didn’t know where the money had come from and instructed her to do nothing.

Having investigated quite a few of these “finger trouble” EFT cases over the years, I find it highly unlikely the bank would have given her such advice and unable to trace the account from which that mystery payment came.

But what’s not in dispute is that Mr Thabede of Edenvale, whose R90,000 made its way from his Nedbank home loan account into Mrs B’s Absa account instead of his Absa account, didn’t realise what happened until 18 months later.

How is that possible? Well, his Absa account number was incorrectly captured on the transfer form in that Nedbank branch in March 2022. One digit in their number — a 3 — became an 8, turning it into Mrs B’s Absa account number. Failing to notice that, he signed the form.

How that happened is in dispute, but clearly someone mistook a 3 for an 8 and the result was that the money went into the wrong account.

As to why Thabede was unaware of the error for 18 long months, well, he says when he queried the matter, Nedbank advised him his application for a R90,000 extension to his home loan — intended to fund his daughter’s university tuition — had been declined.

He admits he didn’t scrutinise the quarterly home loan statements he received from the bank, and the increase in his instalment went unnoticed, he said, because he had always paid way above the instalment amount set by the bank.

When he did discover what had happened, in September last year, Thabede sought Absa’s help in getting Mrs B to pay back the money.

“I sat in a very helpful bank manager’s office when she called Mrs B, telling her I was with her, and that she could clearly see that the R90,000 had gone from our Nedbank account into her Absa account, which differed from mine by a single digit.

“She gave Mrs B the option of returning the money to my Nedbank home loan account, or to the Absa account number into which it was intended to go.

“But she (Mrs B) didn’t want to talk about it, and instructed the manager not to call her again,” Thabede said.

It was then that he opened a case of theft with the SAPS.

I sat in a very helpful bank manager’s office when she called Mrs B, telling her I was with her, and that she could clearly see that the R90,000 had gone from our Nedbank account into her Absa account, which differed from mine by a single digit

Mrs B responded by hiring an attorney, who engaged with the investigating officer, and she ultimately agreed to repay the money.

But she wasn’t going to make it easy. She and the attorney have had Thabede and Nedbank jumping through many hoops, over many months, apparently to prove that his claim to the money was not fraudulent.

It’s not unusual for unintended beneficiaries to find it hard to give back their cash bonus. Many are convinced their prayers were answered by the unexpected windfall.

Of course there is no shortage of court judgments which conclude that someone who refuses to return money they know not to be theirs is guilty of theft.

Student Sibongile Mani’s case is the most notorious — she was paid R14m instead of R1,400 by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and then went on a 73-day, R800,000 spending spree. She is currently appealing against her five-year sentence.

In this case, Mrs B’s lawyer justifies his client’s demand for proof that the money did indeed come from Thabede’s Nedbank account by saying she needed to protect herself from a claim from someone else down the line.

“They asked for a copy of my ID and bank-stamped documents indicating the transfer, which I did,” Thabede told me. “Her lawyer then requested further documents from the bank indicating that I was the account holder. I complied.

“Then the lawyer said he wanted to get mail directly from Nedbank’s legal department. The bank informed me that they cannot deal with a third party, which is why they sent it to me, but still the woman said it could be fraud-proof.

“This is ridiculous. I am paying interest on that money every month.”

By the time I took up the case with Nedbank, the bank had already complied with the attorney’s demands.

“A letter has now been sent to the attorney from the legal department’s email address in the ‘manner’ in which it was asked for and generated the documents evidencing the transfer.

“From a process perspective Nedbank has exhausted all avenues to facilitate repatriation of the funds to our client.

“We hope the Absa account holder will now return the funds that are not due to her.”

Well, not quite. The lawyer offered Thabede R70,000, the R20,000 being deducted to cover legal fees.

“Why should Mrs B have to pay for legal fees when it wasn’t her mistake?” he told me when I called the R20,000 deduction preposterous.

“In fact, it should be more,” he said. “Who is going to pay me for this half-hour conversation with you?”

Worse, they proposed that that R70,000 be paid back not in a lump sum, but in seven R10,000 monthly instalments, and only on condition that the criminal charge against Mrs B be withdrawn.

She doesn’t have the money to pay a lump sum, her attorney said.

OK, so if she did understand that the money wasn’t hers, and she had no intention of keeping it indefinitely, as she claims, she wouldn’t have spent it, now would she?

In response to Thabede’s understandable objection to those terms, Mrs B sharpened her pencil and came back with her final offer — repaying the R70,000 within four months. That was begrudgingly accepted by Thabede.

Let’s hope that Mrs B sticks to the agreement.

The moral of the story: it pays to obsessively check bank account numbers or beneficiary names before finalising an EFT, because if your money lands up in the wrong account there’s a good chance you won’t get it back — at least not without a fight.

The courts will be on your side, but that’s a long and expensive road.

GET IN TOUCH: You can contact Wendy Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via email: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler.