Can you imagine going to an ATM one day to withdraw some money to pay for dinner and drinks with your friends and discovering that you can withdraw as much money as you want, without limit, and without it being deducted from your checking account balance?
This, which for the 99% of the population who don’t have more than six figures in their bank balance, ended up becoming a nightmare for Dan Saunders, a humble Australian waiter touched by the goddess of Fortune.
The Magic ATM with infinite money
Vice told the incredible story firsthand of Dan Saunders, a 29-year-old Australian bartender who left the bar he was at with his wife and friends one night in 2011 to withdraw some money to pay for dinner. When he tried to find out how much he could withdraw from his battered checking account, the ATM displayed the message “Balance not available at this time.”
Unable to know how much money he had available, Saunders tried to be sure by transferring 200 Australian dollars from his credit account to his checking account in order to have enough money to withdraw. It wasn’t possible. The ATM returned the message “Transaction cancelled” and returned the card to him.
When the cashier refused to allow such a common transaction, Saunders decided to try his luck and see if the ATM would allow him to withdraw money from his checking account. The cashier showed no problem and handed him the 200 Australian dollars he needed to pay for the drinks, so he returned to the bar with his partner and friends.
The cashier’s strange behavior intrigued the young man. Upon leaving the bar, a few drinks too many and with nothing better to do, Dan Saunders returned to the cashier to try his luck again. Just out of curiosity.
He repeated the transfer of 200 Australian dollars so the transaction wouldn’t go into the red, then tried to withdraw 200 dollars, then repeated with 500 dollars, and continued with 600 dollars, until he had a total of 2,000 dollars. He was sure his account didn’t have as much money as the teller had told him. “It was like a magic trick.”
UNLIMITED Balance Due to Bank Failure
The next morning, with his wallet full of cash, Saunders called the bank to check his balance. He was extremely surprised when they told him he still had the same balance as the day before, both in his credit and checking accounts.
He decided to wait a little longer to see if the bank took a certain amount of time to reflect the movements, and after 24 hours, the savings account reflected a negative balance of the amount he had withdrawn the night before, but the credit account did not record any movement.
After several experiments, Saunders discovered that, during the early morning hours, the ATM system disconnected from the bank and the Internet, so he could take advantage of that time to make the transfer between accounts and withdraw the money from the ATM so that there was no trace of the transaction.
The only drawback was that every day he had to increase the amount he transferred from the credit account to avoid going into the red. “I could ‘create’ the money out of thin air by making a transfer between 1 and 3 a.m., when the ATMs weren’t connected to the bank,” Saunders said.
Millionaire by “Magic”
In just under four months, Dan Saunders withdrew more than 1.6 million Australian dollars during his nightly trips to the ATM. That’s about 980,000 euros, and no one at the bank noticed anything was happening to the money because the transactions were settled without leaving any debt on their accounts.
However, the amount of cash he needed to withdraw was increasing, so the ATMs weren’t as stocked. So he evolved his system and started making transfers at night, but going to the bank to withdraw the cash himself in the morning.
“It was very addictive to know that with just a tap you could increase your balance by millions; I felt like a caveman who had just discovered fire,” the bartender explained in his interview with Vice.
With that money, Dan began living the life of a millionaire, throwing lavish parties with his friends, renting private jets for his trips, and paying his friends’ college tuition, although some were reluctant to play along knowing where all that money came from.
“When they know you have money, they treat you differently. If someone finds out you have a lot of money, they’ll come and sell you some idea to make more. For example, I remember going to the bank to withdraw money, and when the girl helping me saw my balance, her attitude changed. Suddenly, I looked in admiration at this guy who had millions in his account. That’s how rich people live,” he said in his interview.
Saunders never told his family the source of the money. “They would have scolded me. I told a lot of people who worked in investments or real estate. I must have told countless versions because I met so many people that I can’t even remember.”
His Guilt Caught Up With Him Before the Police Did
Despite all the money he had withdrawn from the ATM using this method, the bank never suspected the embezzlement that was taking place. However, these acts did weigh on Dan Saunders’s conscience, and he was beginning to worry about the scale of the embezzlement. “It was just numbers on a screen. For over four months, no one even noticed. In my mind, I wasn’t stealing from anyone.” Nevertheless, the guilt was beginning to take its toll.
“I even dreamed that they would come to arrest me. One night I had a nightmare where a SWAT team was waiting for me in front of the hotel where I was staying. I remember waking up drenched in sweat and at that moment the doorbell rang. That’s it. It’s over. They’re coming for me, I thought—which would have been a relief, really—but it turned out to be the chambermaid,” Saunders recalled.
Dan Saunders’ fear of the police one day knocking on his door was so great that he even devised an escape plan that included hiding in plain sight among the tourists of Mallorca. “I would have fled to Spain, maybe Mallorca, and put all my money not in banks, but in casinos, because they don’t ask questions,” he claimed.
Finally, Saunders contacted his bank to explain the computer glitch he’d discovered and how he’d been illegally withdrawing money from their ATMs. The bank simply told him, “You’re now in the hands of the police, and we can’t talk to you. The police will call you, but you’ve got yourself into serious trouble,” he explained in his interview.
The humble Australian waiter thought the police would come immediately to arrest him, but for two years he heard nothing from the police. Tired of the uncertainty, he turned to the media to make his case public. His story became a prime-time documentary, which caught the attention of the police, and they arrested him.
Eventually, an investigation and trial began, in which Dan Saunders was sentenced to one year in prison and 18 months of community service. According to his lawyer, the bank had failed to report Saunders to the police in an attempt to cover up its security breach. This was why it took so long to arrest him. He only drew attention to the crime he had committed after publicly announcing it on television.