Man Seeks Answers About Random $250,000 Payment From Google

A random bank deposit of a quarter-million dollars spurred a man to seek answers online this week.

Sam Curry, a staff security engineer in the Omaha metropolitan area, took to Twitter after he was unable to explain his sudden windfall.

"It's been a little over 3 weeks since Google randomly sent me $249,999 and I still haven't heard anything on the support ticket," he tweeted, along with a screenshot of the deposit. "Is there any way we could get in touch @Google?"

The engineer added, "It's OK if you don't want it back."

Curry told Newsweek he was "super shocked" by the deposit.

"I thought it'd be reversed, but over the next three weeks I kept trying to figure out what it could be for," he said.

Curry sometimes works as a bug bounty hunter, helping companies find vulnerabilities in their software. He has done this work for Google in the past, but he couldn't find any connection between his bug bounty hunting and the hefty sum in his account.

The mystery was solved when Google confirmed it had accidentally paid the wrong party as a result of "human error."

After Curry's tweet, the company sent him an account number to return the money. He wired it back on Friday.

It is illegal to knowingly keep money that was accidentally deposited into your account. Spending that money is considered a form of theft, which could result in misdemeanor charges if the deposit is under $950 or even felony charges for a larger amount, according to criminal defense attorney Peter M. Liss with Vista Criminal Law.

In April 2021, a 911 dispatcher from Louisiana was arrested for allegedly refusing to return an accidental deposit of more than $1.2 million. The funds were mistakenly transferred to Kelyn Spadoni by financial services company Charles Schwab & Co., which only intended to send about $82. Spadoni allegedly moved the money to another account immediately, then spent a portion of it on a new car and a house.

Another Louisiana couple mistakenly received the shocking sum of $50 billion in June 2021 but thought better than to repeat Spadoni's mistake. Darren James said that he and his wife immediately called their bank to report the incident. Within days, the money disappeared from their account.

And in 2019, a Texas woman found $37 million in her account after a clerical error made by her local bank. Ruth Balloon also notified her bank, but not before taking a screenshot to prove that she spent one day as a millionaire.

"I was a millionaire. I have a screenshot of it so I can say that now. It's quite a story," Balloon said at the time.

Newsweek reached out to Google for comment.

Update 9/19/22, 10:50 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with comments from Sam Curry.