Google Accidentally Paid Someone Nearly $250,000
Google accidentally paid one man $250,000, admitted that it was an error and that they intended to take the money back but have not yet done anything to retrieve the funds.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if you just woke up to $250,000 in your bank account one day? That would certainly be a lovely dream but that actually became one’s man reality one morning. Sam Curry, a hacker by profession and staff security engineer at Yuga Labs, received exactly $249,999 randomly one day, courtesy of Google.
Curry took to social media to document the momentous event. He posted a tweet on Twitter that included a screenshot of the large sum. In the tweet, he also called out Google citing that it had been 3 weeks since he received the money and that he was looking for a way to get in touch, while playfully adding that it was just fine if they didn’t want the money back.
Curry believed that he had most likely received the funds in error. Curry does do work for Google on the side trying to detect bugs and other deficits in their software. However, he could find no justification as to why they would pay him that exorbitant amount of money.
As it turns out, Curry’s logic was right the money (pun fully intended). Google had sent him the funds accidentally. A Google spokesperson told NPR that the payment was a result of human error and that they would take steps to retrieve the money.
“Our team recently made a payment to the wrong party as the result of human error. We appreciate that it was quickly communicated to us by the impacted partner, and we are working to correct it,” Google asserted in a statement. Interestingly enough, as of Thursday Curry still had the funds in his account and has not yet heard from Google.
I guess they aren’t in too much of a hurry to get their money back? But if you make as much money as Google, $250,000 is more like $2.50. Hence, the mistake with Curry is probably not a top priority for them and he might be waiting for a while.
Although, Google was just fined $4 billion over in the United Kingdom for antitrust violations. Considering that, perhaps the company should be more concerned about reclaiming that $250,000. A fine of $4 billion is nothing to sneeze at.
Still, at this point, it remains unclear just how long Curry will have to sit on the sizable chunk of change that Google accidentally gave him. For now, just to cover his bases Curry has taken steps to transfer the money to another account. He did this to protect against any taxes that he might be charged on it, despite the fact that the money is not his to keep.
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time that Curry has been in the news in connection with a large corporation like Google. Recently, Curry spoke to the New York Times to reveal that he had been in communication with the hacker the infiltrated Uber. Uber suffered a massive data hemorrhage and the company is still working to uncover the full scope of what the hacker was able to access.
