New Zealand Couple do bunk with bungled overdraft funds

Courtesy of  @Firstlink and @DataQualityPro on Twitter, and hot of the presses at BBC News comes this case of an IQTrainwreck in New Zealand.

Police are hunting for a pair of nefarious desperadoes who took advantage of a poor unsuspecting bank which deposited NZ$10 Million in their account instead of the NZ$10,000 that they had requested. That’s a difference of three zeroes, but in the wrong place.

The couple, it seems, have withdrawn an undisclosed amount of the money and appear to have left the country. They are being pursued by the authorities through Interpol, and it seems the Australian bank that gave them the money by accident are eager to have it back:

Westpac media relations manager Craig Dowling said the bank was “pursuing vigorous criminal and civil action to recover a sum of money stolen”.

Now, this is not the first time that something like this has happened in the Antipodes, and the last time it was WestPac who were over-generous with their credit.

Oops we did it again before

Back in September 2007 we carried the story of New South Wales business man Victor Ollis who, as a result of an undetected (by WestPac) error had benefited to the tune of AUD$11 Million. The quote below is from the original story on Australia’s news.com.au

Mr Ollis had an automatic transfer facility with the bank, which topped up his business account using funds from his personal account.

The transfers should have been stopped after his personal account was overdrawn in February 2004, the court heard yesterday.

But due to an error at Westpac, his account continued to be replenished – only with money “from the bank’s own pocket”.

Between June and December 2005, Westpac honoured cheques totalling about $11 million written by Mr Ollis.

WestPac sued Mr Ollis and were awarded their money back plus interest.  However, as Mr Ollis was apparently terminally ill at the time, there is a chance that they never got their money back.

A proud tradition in banking

However, WestPac are not alone in the pantheon of banking information quality trainwrecks. (We won’t talk about the current Global Financial Crisis and how some of its roots can be traced back to poor quality information… not yet anyway).

• In 2007 a man in Georgia USA was shocked to receive a demand from his bank for an outstanding debt that exceed (then) the total national debt of the USA.
• In 2008, a schoolboy in the UK found himself £300 in debt after his bank accidentally lodged £2 million to his account.
• An Irish bank failed to properly apply interest rate changes to mortgage products back in 2008.

My personal favourite from our archive of Banking Information Quality Trainwrecks has to be this one though…

• From Australia in  December 2007 – “Cat Gets Credit Card“. In this case it wasn’t WestPac but the Bank of Queensland who goofed.

But we’re only scratching the surface

Here at IQTrainwrecks.com we know we are only scratching the surface of these issues. Please contact us with your examples of Information Quality Trainwrecks (particulary in banking) so we can add them to the Roll of Honour.