When you go to bed at night, what do you hope for when you wake? A job promotion? Meeting the love of your life the next day? Unfathomable wealth to fall into your lap without having to work a single day for it?
One family in Louisiana woke up one morning to find $50,000,000,000 in their bank account. Yep. $50 billion just casually sitting in their account.
Darren James received a phone call from his wife in the morning as he usually would. But this time she was calling to tell him they were technically the 25th richest family on Earth.
“It was crazy just to see what it looks like because I’ve never seen that many zeros in my life,” said James.
“And all we were thinking was, ‘Who’s going to be knocking at our door?’ Because we don’t know anybody with that type of money,”
The family called Chase bank to tell them they think there’s been an error. And there had been. And it turns out if the bank accidentally send you money, it’s illegal to spend it.
“I wasn’t going to keep it. The thing that was most baffling was, we don’t even know where it came from. We don’t know anybody with that kind of money,”
“A hold [was] placed on it. It showed up on Saturday to make a deposit for our daughter. It stayed there Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday it was gone,”
“I was a billionaire for four days, It was a cool feeling, even though you couldn’t do anything with it.”
“It was a great feeling while it was there, to see that many zeros in your account. I mean, I’m part of the one-comma club, not the three-comma club.”
“We knew it wasn’t ours. We didn’t earn it, so we couldn’t do anything with it. We couldn’t spend it — that would be theft,”
“There’s enough greatness in this world where we can all have a life we never thought was possible, so if I did have $50 billion, I would bless others,”
Fair plays to the family for their honesty. But I don’t know about you, I would have been on the first plane out of there and I’m taking my chances of not being caught.
