A blogger and security engineer who received a quarter-million dollars by mistake from Google claims he waited nearly a month for a response.
On Wednesday, Sam Curry, who also describes himself as a hacker shared a screenshot along with the statement that the tech giant had “randomly” transferred him $249,999.
Curry added in the tweet, “It’s OK if you don’t want it back,” adding that it had been more than three weeks since he had gotten the money and that he had been issued a support ticket when he contacted Google.
Curry claimed that instead of spending the money, he saved it for the inevitable request for repayment from the corporation. He told NPR that in order to avoid paying tax on the money, he might need to transfer it to another account.
The security engineer told NPR that he performs “bug bounty hunting” work for corporations like Google. He is paid to look for flaws in businesses’ software.
He did not, however, see how the transfer related to his work at Google. As of Thursday, he still had the money.
“Our team recently made a payment to the wrong party as the result of human error,” a Google spokesperson told NPR in a statement. “We appreciate that it was quickly communicated to us by the impacted partner, and we are working to correct it.”
A Google spokesperson also disclosed to NPR that the company intended to recover the funds.
A similar occurrence occurred last month when the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com unintentionally sent a woman over $10 million instead of $100. She spent or transferred significant amounts of money by the time the corporation realised the blunder, which was seven months later.
