On Christmas Day, European bank Santander (NYSE: SAN) mistakenly deposited £130 million ($176 million) into people's banks, much to their surprise, reaching across 75,000 transactions.
The error occurred when payments from 2,000 business accounts in the United Kingdom went through two times, which meant that some workers experienced double the amount of their original salaries, and providers also received far more than what they were initially anticipating.
Santander stated that these double payments came about from a "scheduling issue" that has now been resolved. It is now attempting to make up for any accidental payments, since a high amount of them have gone into bank accounts that are run by other bank competitors.
"We're sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts," a Santander spokesperson told CNBC.
The New York Times revealed that the money was deposited in banks such as Barclays Plc (NYSE: BCS), HSBC Holdings Plc (NYSE: HSBC), NatWest (NYSE: NWG), Co-operative Bank, and Virgin Money UK Plc. A concern for some of the banks is that their customers could have already spent some of the deposited money, according to NYT.
Santander spoke to each of the individual banks, and each of them said that they would "look to recover the money from their customers' accounts." It was not, however, clear as to how banks would react if any of their customers had spent the money already, which means that if they gave it back, then it would cause their accounts to go into states of overdraft.
Some reports imply that the issue might have significantly discouraged the payroll staff on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
"It ruined my holiday period because I thought I'd paid out hundreds of thousands in error - I thought I had done something wrong," one payroll manager informed the BBC. "I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work."