Quote from jem:
I would like to see how it would be determined to be a crime. There may be a statute to support you on this but without knowing the specific wording I just can not believe such a law would be constitutional.
There was no mens rea. The money showed up in his account. I just do not see how a person could be tagged with a duty to act to correct anothers mistake. (we are talking criminal law not civil) Disclaimer - this is a theoretical argument, I might be wrong.
By the way a friend of mine had an extra 10 g in his account at a retail futures broker. He said it was not his multiple times. He talked to a high ranking guy. The guy said the money was his. He closed his account and kept the money, figuring a mistake like that would lead to others.
I'm not an attorney so I don't know the specific statute but I seem to recall a case not too long ago in which a person received and erroneous deposit into his or her checking account at a bank. That person promptly set about spending the windfall but as soon as the error was discovered, the bank initiated legal proceedings to recover the funds. If I'm not mistaken, that person faced criminal charges.
The bottom line is, the money is not yours. It belongs to someone else regardless of whether or not it was placed into your account by mistake. You have no legal ownership of the funds.
Here's an illustration: If an armored car was involved in an accident with your car and a bag of money happened to end up in your car somehow, you can be damn sure the institution that owned the money would do everything possible to get that bag of money back. Just because the bag ended up in your car doesn't mean ownership was transferred to you, it still belongs to the institution. If you drove off with the bag and proceeded to spend the money, you would most certainly be arrested. Same concept with the brokerage situation.
Even if it were legal because the broker made a mistake, where are your morals? What if that were your $50 million that ended up in someone else's account? You would want it back, wouldn't you?
IMHO, the breakdown in ethics so prevalent these days is creating a crisis in our society. I know, these kinds of things have been going on since the beginning of time, but it has to stop if we want to move forward philosophically. What does this say to our kids? What has happened to the concepts of equality and shame? I could go on but I won't. You all know who you are.
Uni