Emily Brown
Picture the scene: you've just about managed to drag yourself through to the end of the month, and your pay check has finally landed in your bank.
You open up the banking app, but do a double take when you realize you've been paid way more than were expecting. Approximately 330 times more, to be precise. What do you do?
I have to admit, I'm far too afraid of getting in trouble to do anything other than alert the person in charge of payroll, but not everyone feels the same.
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In Chile, one employee found himself in this exact situation, but definitely didn't run straight to the finance team to make them aware of their mistake.
The man, who has not been named, worked at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos (Cial), a company which produces cold cut meats in Chile, and was usually paid 500,000 pesos ($525) for his work.
However, on one pay day, the company accidentally sent a payment of 165,398,851 Chilean pesos ($173,668.79) to the employee instead.
Cial's human resources department quickly spotted the error and attempted to recall the money, and the employee obliged by agreeing to go to his bank the next morning and make sure the money got sent back, Dario Financiero reported.
However, when the next day came, the man did not show up to work, and his employers were unable to contact him despite their repeated efforts via call, text, and WhatsApp.
The employee effectively ghosted the company entirely - though he did have a lawyer get in touch to say he'd officially resigned from his position.
Clearly, this man wasn't as afraid of the consequences as I would be.
Cial wasn't going to go down without a fight though, and launched legal action against their former staffer to try and get the money back.
"He was informed and clarified that this money did not correspond to the payment of any service," Chilean legal documents claim, as per Diario Financiero.
The company accused the employee of misappropriation of funds with the hope of recovering some of the lost money, but six months on from the initial payment news agency IOL issued an update in December 2022 to say police had failed to locate the former employee.
With the equivalent of 330 paychecks in the bank, the former employee wouldn't have needed to resurface for a very long time. Let's just hope he at least spent the money wisely.