Money strangely credited to my account

I have just arrived back from holiday to find a week-old letter from a bank (where I hold a savings account) showing a payment into my account of over 5,000euro. The lodgement date was during the period that I was away, and as I have not used that account since I originally opened it over a year ago, there is no possibility that the transaction was mine (even if I could imagine myself being able to forget where I left a sum of money of that size!).

I plan to contact the bank to ask them to investigate, but in the meantime has anyone else ever had this happen to them? While it would make a very nice post-holiday present to be able to keep this money, I would imagine that the bank will just say "thank for letting us know" and debit my account by the amount again i.e. I presume that I have no legal entitlement to the cash even if it was credited to my account by a mistake on the part of the bank?

Sadly if the money was credited to your account in error, you have no claim to it.

Thanks Vanilla. I dropped into the bank today, and they were pleasantly surprised that I brought this to their attention. They are going to investigate it and let me know what they find, but it looks like no-one has queried this amount of money as missing from their own account as yet. I kinda got the impression that if I had just walked in, closed my account, and walked out with the mystery cash, they felt they wouldn't have been any the wiser. ...I feel inclined to leave my account open with them for a little longer as the rate of return appears to be "significant"

When you lodge money to an account it's reasonably easy to put a wrong number on the lodgement slip espectially if it's someone elses account.

The banks as far as I know use a Checksum digit or digits in the account number, so if you simply get a digit or two wrong it's unlikely you'll produce another valid account number. But I'm sure every now and then someone makes such a muck up of an account number that they hit another valid one.

My company a/c number starts with 086. It took me months to get used to not listing off the digits of an 086 mobile phone number.

-Rd

I used to have a bank of ireland current account in the dun laoghaire branch and there was another account with the exact same digits held by some guy in Bank of Ireland O'Connell St. I know cos they one debited my account for some transaction he made. Have since changed a/c's

My only experience is AIB and I recall being told they use Checksums. I always assumed that the Checksum would have included the Sort-Code in some way.

I don't know about BofI. But they'd be pretty silly not to have adopted this approach. Could be though. Could easily be.

Incidently you're Credit Card Number also uses a Checksum.

-Rd

Credit cards use Luhn's Theorem, also known as Mod10. American Express starts with 3, Visa always starts with 4, Mastercard with 5.