As the month winds down, your paycheck arrives in your bank. When you open the banking app, you realize you’ve received far more than you anticipated. The amount is precisely 330 times higher than your initial estimate. What are you doing? I must admit that I am far too terrified of getting in trouble to do anything other than notify the payroll manager, but not everyone feels the same way.
In Chile, one employee found himself in this identical circumstance, but he did not immediately notify the financial staff of their error. Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos (Cial), a Chilean firm that produces cold-cut meats, employed the unnamed individual, who received a monthly salary of 500,000 pesos ($525). However, on one payday, the corporation erroneously delivered a payment of 165,398,851 Chilean pesos ($173,668.79) to the employee. According to Dario Financiero, Cial’s human resources staff swiftly identified the issue and sought to recall the funds, and the employee agreed to travel to his bank the next morning to ensure their return. However, when the next day arrived, the man did not arrive at work, and his bosses were unable to contact him despite numerous attempts by phone, text, and WhatsApp.
The employee basically abandoned the organization, but he did have a lawyer contact him to confirm his resignation. Clearly, this individual was not as concerned about the implications as I would be. Cial, however, was not going down without a fight, and they filed a lawsuit against their former employee to recover the money. According to Diario Financiero, Chilean court filings inform and clarify that this money did not correspond to the payment of any service. The corporation charged the employee with theft of funds in the hopes of retrieving part of the lost money; however, six months after the original payment, news agency IOL released an update in December 2022 stating that police had failed to identify the former employee. With the equivalent of 330 paychecks in the bank, the former employee would not have needed to return for a long time. Let’s hope he used his money properly.
