$50 billion accidentally deposited to Louisiana family’s bank account

BATON ROUGE, La. — For one day, a Louisiana family could call themselves billionaires.

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Darren James, of Baton Rouge, said his wife called him in a panic after she looked at her daughter’s bank account online and saw a deposit for $50 billion, WVLA reported.

“She says ‘Look,’ and pulls up the Chase account,” James told the television station. “And it was $50 billion.”

James said his daughter was really excited.

“She’s like, ‘No way, oh my God,’” James told WVLA. “I’m like, ‘Don’t be getting your hopes up. We can’t do nothing with it.’”

James was right. In April, a Louisiana woman was arrested after she refused to return more than $1.2 million mistakenly deposited into her brokerage account.

Still, James confessed it was strange -- and exciting -- to see so much money in the account.

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“It was crazy just to see what it looks like because I’ve never seen that many zeros in my life,” James told the television station.

It was the second time this month that a person found a huge amount of money in their bank account. A Florida woman, who also had a Chase banking account, found $1 billion had been deposited to her account.

After noticing the 11-figure amount in the family account, James called his bank hoping to find out how it got there.

>> Police: Louisiana woman refuses to return $1.2M mistakenly deposited into her account

“The thing that was most baffling was, we don’t even know where it came from,” James said. “We don’t know anybody with that kind of money.”

James went to the Chase branch and talked to bank officials about the mistake, and the error was reversed by Tuesday, WVLA reported.

The family took screenshots of the account to remember the once-in-a-lifetime error.

“I wasn’t going to keep it, no matter what,” James told the television station.

But for a few days, the family was in a much higher income bracket.

“We took screenshots to say, ‘Hey, look, we were were once -- I guess -- theoretically, in theory, billionaires,” James told WVLA.

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