One evening at the end of last year, Frank Arnautovic logged into the bank and saw that he had received SEK 145,000 in the account, which he had not expected. Strange, he thought, but went to bed anyway.
When he logged in the next morning to check the balance, more money had come in, and it stayed that way throughout the day.
Every time Frank Arnautovic logged in he thought everything was fine and the money was being withdrawn, but it just kept happening. When it stopped, around SEK 10 million had ended up in Frank Arnautovic’s account. Dagens Industri also reported on this.
He thought the bank would probably call soon and apologize and fix the mistake, but nothing happened. Finally he called the bank himself.
– I wanted it removed from my account. First, because it’s not my money, and second, because it felt unfunny. “I didn’t know if anything criminal had happened,” says Frank Arnautovic.
Frank Arnautovic works as Furniture upholsterer and was sued several years ago by the Dux furniture company, which sought to prevent him from selling reupholstered or new cushion sets for the popular Jetson armchair, for which they hold the manufacturing license.
The Patent and Market Court followed Dux’s line and banned the sale, and Frank Arnautovic was sentenced to a fine and court costs totaling over a million crowns. He is still heavily in debt to the bailiff, but it was not planned that he would touch the money from the mysterious deposits.
– You should be happy that it ended up with me and not with the wrong person, says Frank Arnautovic.
After he reached the bank, the money was withdrawn. It was a relief. But as he tried to understand what had happened, he only became more confused. The bank explains in an email that Frank’s bank ID was used to transfer the money to his account – from one of the bank’s accounting accounts.
“Whether this was done by you or not is unclear, but it is your bank ID that you are responsible for,” the bank clerk writes, then points out:
“The money transferred did not belong to you but was withdrawn from the bank and will likely be considered theft in the event of a criminal prosecution. This matter is now fully resolved for the bank and we have no plans to report the incident to the police.”
– It’s humiliating. You call and say “Hey, I have 10 million in the account that belongs to you, please take it back,” and then they say like this, says Frank Arnautovic and continues:
– They should thank them for this, encourage them and maybe even reward them.
DN participated Bank statement and email exchange from Frank Arnautovic with the bank, but the bank does not want to answer questions about it.
“We do not comment on individual customer cases and can therefore neither confirm nor deny whether the case was actually handled as described,” writes David Henriksson, press spokesman at SEB, in an email to DN.
In general, it is extremely rare for incorrect amounts to be visible in an account, he says and emphasizes:
“SEB has systems in place to detect erroneous transactions and we have processes in place to process these correctly and legally, although depending on the circumstances of the individual case, the processes can sometimes take longer than desired.”
