Free Money’s Fine Print

Somewhere in the back of almost everyone’s mind sits the same small, dumb daydream. You’re standing at an ATM, you hit “withdraw,” and the machine just, well, it keeps going. Money comes out but not out of your account. Just an endless stream of $20 bills, as if you’ve earned it. It’s about the closest thing real life offers to a cheat code — free money, forever, no strings.

For four and a half months in 2011, an Australian bartender actually got to live inside it. And in retrospect, it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

That year, late one February night, a 29-year-old named Dan Saunders walked out of a pub in Wangaratta, Victoria, with three dollars in his savings account and a thirst for one more round. He tried to move $200 from his credit card to his savings at a National Australia Bank ATM. The screen flashed “transaction cancelled” and spat his card back out — and then handed him the $200 anyway.

Saunders wasn’t sure why this happened but he didn’t seem to mind. He walked away with the $200 and then tried it again later — and the glitch kept happening. He’d later piece together what was going on, as he explained to the Sydney Morning Herald. Late at night, for reasons unclear, this individual ATM (and perhaps many others) disconnected from the central network momentarily, so if you went to withdraw money, it didn’t pull it from your account — hence the error. But bank officials didn’t want to lock people out in the wee hours of the night, so the ATM gave you the cash anyway and wrote a digital IOU of sorts — it made the money available now and then settled up your accounts for you when it reconnected later that morning.

That shouldn’t be something that anyone can exploit — in the bar night situation above, Saunders would have gotten his $200, and then seen the $200 charge hit the next day. No big deal. But Saunders realized something that few others did. When he first tried to transfer money from his credit card to his savings account, he did so by selecting “Mastercard” from a menu, assuming it would hit his credit card, which it did — the next morning, the bank charged his card the amount he transferred. No problem yet. But for reasons that were never adequately explained, the ATM also had a generic “credit card” option connected, to, well, nothing. And the ATM still spat out cash. After making this discovery, Saunders spent many, many nights transferring money from a phantom credit card to his savings account, and then withdrew an amount less than what he now had listed in savings. As a result, his savings account never looked overdrawn — so the bank never thought anything was amiss — and the credit card debt just vanished into the morass of computer networks. It was an infinite money hack.

Please don’t try it. It is spectacularly illegal, and — as Saunders can personally confirm — it will quietly ruin your life while you’re busy enjoying it. And for a while, he really did enjoy it. He pulled AU$1.6 million (!) out of those machines and spent it like a man who assumed the clock could stop any second: a $90,000 private jet to fly friends to a remote Asian island, dinners for entire restaurants, rounds for whole bars full of strangers, a full high-roller life run on a barman’s imagination. It felt, he said, like discovering fire for the first time as a caveman. It was, he told Vice, “literally just numbers on a screen” — money that, in his head, had never really existed in the first place.

But again, clearly illegal — and despite the fact that he seemed to be getting away with it, Saunders couldn’t handle the mix of guilt and fear of being caught. Underneath the private jets, the dread was compounding faster than the cash. Saunders was taking Valium daily, he told SBS, and once had a panic attack in a Sydney hotel bad enough that a passing doctor stopped to help. He had recurring nightmares about a SWAT team kicking down his door. (“I don’t know why it was a SWAT team,” he later said to LADbible. “I didn’t have any guns.”) The anxiety was overwhelming. “Every day felt like the last one,” he told SBS. “And when nobody came, that almost made it worse.”

So he stopped — and tried to turn himself in. But oddly, even that didn’t work. He confessed to the bank, which didn’t seem to want to know — they did nothing. He went on national television and told everyone. And still, for roughly three more years, nothing happened.

And then, authorities finally decided that Saunders’ crimes were actually worth paying attention to. He was ultimately charged with more than 100 fraud and theft counts, which he didn’t fight. He was sentenced to twelve months in jail, another eighteen months of community corrections, and a $250,000 fine. And after all that, he ended up right where he started, plus a unique experience that he probably wishes he never had. The infinite money glitch, it turned out, had a balance due after all — just not the kind the bank bothered to collect.

Bonus fact: ATMs typically operate in the languages common in the areas they service, and have a language selection screen when you first log in. But what do you do when you have a lot of people coming from all over the world, and they all have different native tongues? You use whatever common language they share — and in the case of priests gathering at the Vatican, that language is Ecclesiastical Latin. So, as Mental Floss notes, if you need cash out of the Vatican’s ATM, and you speak that language, it can help — the machine can “perform transactions in Latin.”

From the Archives: The ATM at the Bottom of the Earth: Cold, hard cash. Well, cold for sure.