Urmila Yadav was making just 2,000 Rupees ($31) per month as domestic help in India when she received the amazing news.
It’s not every day that you wake up and find a mystery deposit in your bank account. Of course, it happens occasionally, but not usually with sums this large. Last week Yadav found that she had 95.7 lakh crore Rupees in her account, according to The Nation.
Massive transfer makes woman in India richest person in the world
Lakh crore is a unit in the numbering system in India, equivalent to a trillion. Yadav essentially woke up with 95.7 trillion Rupees ($150 billion) in her account, which would make her wealthier than Bill Gates.
Yadav found out about the deposit via a message on her phone. She received a notification from her bank that a deposit had been credited to her account.
However when Yadav went to investigate the transaction, she was surprised to find that the transaction was massive. So large in fact, that the lady who previously received state aid was now the richest person in the world.
Bank errors deposit untold riches in customer accounts
As is so often the case, the deposit was the result of an error; this time a server malfunction at the State Bank of India was to blame. Although the money was later removed from her account, the woman was briefly the richest person in the world.
At least the woman did not try to make off with the money, as has happened in the past. Gas station owner Hui Gao fled New Zealand after a bank mistakenly paid $10 million into his account in 2012.
Gao and his girlfriend Kara Hurring spent the money while on the run for 2 years, before Gao was eventually arrested in Hong Kong and extradited to New Zealand. He has since been sentenced to 4 years and 7 months in prison.
Interestingly some of the money is still missing, and the bank is trying to recover it. At least in this latest case the woman’s honesty kept her out of trouble with the law in India. Yadav may not have become any better off in the long run, but she has a great story to tell for the rest of her life.
