Submitted by StopTheBanging t3_11sd83z in personalfinance
Edit 2: goodness this blew up a bit. Thanks for the awards! May you all have as lucky of a week as I am!
Edit: I gotta focus on work so can't monitor comments anymore but I think I answered everyone's questions. Thanks for those of you were helpful and provided some cool tricks for better ways to transfer funds. I'll update everything when/if I file a complaint against the bank for not responding to my requests (again, don't care they couldnt help in the end, but I do care that they ignored me for months)
Reaching out with a fun update for you all.
So I had hired contractors back in November to fix some drywall in my house and when it came time to pay, I sent the money ($780) to the wrong person because the phone number they gave me had a typo.
I tried to get the bank to reverse the transaction because I realized the issue 2 days later but they never did anything or responded to my phone calls for weeks. Meanwhile, I was going well over the 30 payment clause in the contractor's invoice and it was also getting close to Christmas. The guys said they really needed the money for the holiday and couldn't hold off for me any longer, so I emptied my savings account and paid them (this time to the right account.)
But I still had the 780 mistakingly missing. Tried contacting the bank several more times in the new year and they never got back to me. Then I got COVID and was OOO for a while. By the time I got back on my feet and posted here last week, I was really anxious about losing the money forever. (Several of you were making fun of me for being dumb and falling for some kind of scam with the contractors which super didn't help, if I'm honest!)
What did help was that I sat down this past weekend and made a plan about contacting the person myself and trying to get the person to voluntarily send the money back, and then going to small claims court if needed.
Took me a few days to find the person's full name and cell phone and I called them tonight and left a message explaining the situation, giving the transaction ID and everything so he knew it wasn't a scam.
Guy texted back within the hour saying he had held onto the money because he thought whoever sent it to him by mistake might need it back. He called me and transferred it all back to me tonight, saying it was "just the right thing to do". I sent him $50 back anyway as a thank you.
I do think I'm going to schedule an in-person meeting with my bank manager to file a complaint about their lack of responses tho. I understand now that they couldn't reverse the Zelle payment, but they could at least call me back!
But in the meantime, I have the money back that I desperately need to pay my bills and just in time for my birthday this week. So let this be a lesson that not everyone sucks, not every mistake is a scam, and there are some really good people out there!