Google Mistakenly Sent An Engineer Almost $250000, Calls It ‘Human Error’

It has kind of become a normal story that random people receive huge amounts of money accidentally in their accounts. Some of them innocently believe it to be their fortune and use it and some inform their banks about the same. This time an engineer received over $250000 in his bank account and that too from Google.

The payment was allegedly made mistakenly by the tech giant and considering that Sam Curry, who is a staff engineer at cryptocurrency company Yuga Labs, informed Google about the same, and according to him, he hasn’t heard back from Google in 3 three weeks. Curry took to the microblogging site to describe the event using his verified account. He wrote, 

It’s been a little over 3 weeks since Google randomly sent me $249,999 and I still haven’t heard anything on the support ticket. Is there any way we could get in touch @Google?

Furthermore, sarcastically expressing his frustration in the tweet where he also attached the screenshot of the payment, Curry stated, “It’s OK if you don’t want it back,” he added.”

However, on the other hand, Google seems to be working towards getting the money back while terming the payment as ‘human error’. Talking to CNN, the tech giant in a statement has said that its team had recently made a payment to the ‘Wrong Party’ which it calls the result of ‘human error’.

The company’s spokesperson in a statement through an email appreciated that the engineer quickly communicated the error to the company and it is currently working to correct the same.

On the other hand, Curry has told NPR news that he has not spent the money and keeping it to give it back to the tech giant whenever it asks. However, he also mentioned that if the process of will takes too long, he may need to transfer the money to another account in order to avoid paying tax on the amount. 

Notably, Curry is able to spend the money however, he is waiting for the instructions to return the money. Curry also wonders about the frequency of such events from the side of Google and what policies the company has to prevent and deal with such transactions.

He is a security engineer, a professional who looks for vulnerabilities in the software of companies and carries out bug bounty hunting for companies like Google. This means that he is a hacker who breaks into companies’ software in order to explore and expose potential vulnerabilities of the same. Although, he does not see any connection between his work and the transaction from Google into his account.

Considerably, such events of ‘human error’ are not new as a similar incident was reported over a month ago when a woman from Australia Thevamanogari Manivel had received over $10.5 million from a cryptocurrency-exchanges company. The company was supposed to make a payment of over $100 and accidentally it transferred the huge amount of $10.5 million in May 2021. The company failed to spot the error until 7 months when an audit was carried out in December month.