Silly Banking Error Costs Woman $36K

It was a sickening, gut-wrenching moment when, one evening in October 2012, Sally Donaldson checked her bank account and realised she had made the silliest financial mistake of her life.

Two years earlier, hairdresser Sally had organised for her monthly pay, £1,000, to be transferred from her HSBC account to the joint account at Nationwide building society she shares with her husband. But on that October night, the mother of two discovered she had made a simple but calamitous error.

It's a mistake anyone can make. To transfer money online from one account to another, you simply tap in the recipient's name, their sort code [note:  this is the UK's equivalent of the routing code] and account number. But Sally had incorrectly typed in just one of the eight digits in the account number – and the money was sent to the wrong person.

What makes her story so extraordinary, though, is that she made the mistake in May 2010. Every month since – for more than two years – her pay was going into someone else's Nationwide account. And now, to her horror, Sally is discovering she has almost no chance of getting back a penny of the £26,650 transferred in error.