Bank mistakenly slips cash into retiree’s account
Dave Scott, 74, wondered whether it was friends he had to thank for the lump sum payment. It wasn’t.
Just as time began to feel like a never-ending loop of the film Groundhog Day, a quarantinedout Dave Scott was thrust into The Twilight Zone.
To blame? An unexpected, mysterious deposit of $13,103.15 in his CIBC account on the morning of April 30.
The 74-year-old Hamiltonian, nearly a decade removed from a long career as a health and safety manager, first wondered whether it was a friend — or several friends — he had to thank for the lump sum payment.
So, like a detective chasing a paper trail, Scott sat down, still a little in shock, and penned them an email.
“Is this true?” one friend asked.
“Fake news,” another bluntly replied.
Suffice to say, they weren’t the generous donors, nor the culprits of some grand prank. The money, in all its thousands, must’ve had a different origin, Scott thought.
He checked expired lottery tickets. No luck. He pondered the possibility of an inheritance. Unlikely.
He wondered whether God had decided to reward him for his good deeds.
“But I don’t think he is in the habit of handing out bonuses,” said Scott, who, after waiting out the weekend, decided the deposit had to be a mistake on behalf of the bank.
By Monday, Scott phoned CIBC’s 1-800 number to ask if there had been a mixup.
The bank assured him that the money was, in fact, deposited into his account at the CIBC branch on King and James streets — just not by him. He asked the bank to check with the branch for who made the deposit.
“They put me on hold while they checked. I said, ‘No problem. I have 13,103 reasons to wait,’” Scott said.
“After a 20-minute wait, they came back on the line and said they could not tell me who deposited the money.”
For the next two days, Scott stewed over the money which, at least according to CIBC, was now his. But was it really his? And was he doing the right thing by keeping mum?
“I wasn’t worried about giving it back,” Scott said, laughing. “I just wanted to know where it came from.”
A reluctant, mask-clad Scott made way for the downtown bank at around 10 a.m. that Wednesday determined, once and for all, to learn where his new-found treasure came from or who it belonged to.
The line spanned about 30 people and it was cold. Scott went home, hoping the branch who had the week prior left him on hold would finally pick up the phone. They did.
“I told my story and they said they would call me back. Within
the hour, they told me the deposit was made by a lawyer’s office and that they were calling them,” Scott said, clinging to his final hope that the money was an inheritance from a long-lost relative.
“A half-hour later, they called to say the money was supposed to go to a client’s line-of-credit account and that the bank made a mistake.”
The next time Scott looked into his account, the money — and all the excitement it brought him — was gone.
A CIBC spokesperson confirmed the incident and said it was an “isolated processing error.”
Error or otherwise, for Scott, the experience was a welcome change of pace to life in quarantine.
But don’t get it twisted: he still misses the cash.
“It was one of those days where you just can’t believe what happened,” he said.
“It was like finding a bag of money — except only in this case it was through the bank.”