Woman arrested after refusing to return $1,200,000 put in her bank by accident
A Louisiana woman was arrested after refusing to return $1,200,000 which landed in her bank account by accident.
I have to admit, it would be hard to part with that kind of cash once you had your hands on it, but it is the right thing to do.
Still, that didn't seem to be enough to convince Kelyn Spadoni, who worked as a 911 dispatcher in Louisana, after the money was wired into her brokerage account in 2021.
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It came from financial services company Charles Schwab, which sent it to the account Spadoni had opened in January of that year after an 'enhancement' was installed in its software used to transfer assets.
According to a lawsuit filed by the company, it had intended to send $82.56 to Spadoni's account, but instead ended up transferring $1,205,619.
Obviously that's not the kind of figure you could easily overlook, so staff attempted to stop and reclaim the transfer.
They reportedly sent a reclaim request to the institution which handles the account where the money had been sent, but they were met with a notification which stated: "CASH NOT AVAILABLE".
Spadoni was accused of having quickly moved the money to another account, as well as using some of it to buy a house and a new car worth between $48,000 and $70,000.
Captain Jason Rivard of the Sheriff's office said: "She secreted it, and they were not able to access it."
The company attempted to reach Spadoni for weeks with no success, prompting them to ultimately contact the Sheriff's office.
Authorities opened a criminal investigation and learned how Spadoni had spent some of the money.
She was arrested and booked with theft valued at more than $25,000, bank fraud and illegal transmission of monetary funds.
Jefferson Parish District Attorney's Office has since confirmed that the charges against Spadoni were dropped, but she didn't get off totally scott-free as she was also fired from her job as a dispatcher.
She also had to complete an 'adult diversion' program.
Charles Schwab's lawsuit claimed Spadoni 'made it clear she [did] not intend to return the mistakenly transferred funds to Schwab', though Rivarde told Nola.com that detectives and Schwab lawyers were later able to get back about 75 percent of the money.
"If someone accidentally puts an extra zero on a utility payment, they would want that money returned or credited to them. This is no different," Rivarde said of the incident.
Spokesman Pete Greenley told The Sun in 2022: "We are grateful to the authorities who were able to recover most of the assets that the defendant unlawfully acquired."
Emily Brown