now this is funny.. this actually happen to my mom many yrs ago. i was with her at the bank, and she gave the teller $100 to deposit in her account, the teller gave her a reciept for $1,000. she didnt tell them anything but we were laughing over her mistake...


Amsterdam man receives $7 billion surprise

Posted: March 13, 2009 03:30 PM PDT



An Amsterdam man receives a (temporary) $7.8 billion surprise of a lifetime! (03/13/09)








NEWS10's Elisa Streeter reports

Amsterdam resident John Garcia went to a local grocery store to deposit a check and walked away with quite a surprise; a $7,800,000,000 surprise, to be exact.

Garcia recalled the moment for NEWS10.

"She said ‘You're John Garcia?' I said, ‘Yeah,' When she handed me the receipt for my deposit, I could understand why she didn't think I was who I was. I was a billionaire. The richest man in Amsterdam," he joked.

Garcia was a billionaire for exactly one hour and 22 minutes after a clerk at the First Niagara bank inside the Price Chopper on Route 30 in Amsterdam made an error, entering Garcia's account number in the spot where the amount should have gone.

Garcia ran home to tell his wife.

"She said, you're not a billionaire, you're a custodian, you clean toilets," he said.

Garcia and his wife then checked their account online.

"She looked online," Garcia remembered, "She says that's a mistake, they'll fix it,"

The error was fixed quickly. Apparently the teller entered John Garcia's account number in the spot where the amount should have gone.

Of course, Garcia knew better than to try and withdraw even a dollar of it.

"First of all, if I'd walk into a bank and say I'd like to withdraw $7 billion, somebody's going to look at me funny. I'd look at me funny. So, and not to mention I'm pretty sure there's a list out there of billionaires, and I'm not one of them," he told NEWS10.

One can still dream, however.

"Honestly, I thought that guy who's in the news now, (Bernie) Madoff or whatever, maybe he stashed some of the money in my account. So I was just grateful, I was going to thank the guy you know,"

"We are wondering how he enjoyed being a billionaire for one hour and 22 minutes," said Amy Rossi, an assistant vice president at First Niagara, "All it takes are numbers placed in the wrong field, but everything is corrected, there are definitely safeguards in place,"

"At six o'clock, I was no longer a billionaire. I was just plain John Garcia the custodian all over again,"

But what a story to tell.

"I'll tell you," Garcia said, "it felt good for two hours. I think I held myself more proper, I had this glow to me, this billionaire glow,"