Basically, when banks pay
interest, they first calculate that
interest out to four decimal places,
but instead of paying the customer all
four digits, they only pay the first
two. The last two were deleted, but not
really.
It still existed and because of
that, and unless a customer made a
request for it within a certain period
of time, it became the bank’s property.
Even if a customer requested it,
and even if it was a year’s worth, it
would only be around six or seven
cents, or something ridiculously small
like that.
It really wasn't that big a deal
when you were only talking about one
customer, but when a bank had hundreds
of thousands, or even millions of
* customers, that could add up to a
couple thousand, or even a couple
hundred thousand dollars, per bank, per
year.
That’s a lot of money to be
stealing from customers.
“My friends go in and hit twenty-
five banks a month, making sure to hit
different ones every month. They take
twenty-five percent of that money, and
then rewrite their books. From what
they tell me, there are hundreds of
thousands of banks in the world, and at
only twenty-five a month, it'll take
forever to get through all of them.”
That’s what I remembered seeing in
that an old Superman movie with Richard
Pryor. He was the computer tech who
figured out how to do that very same
thing, but ever since, I’ve always
wondered if banks did that, and if they
did, what could you do to stop them?
Even after fifty years, all you’d get
is four dollars.
CHAPTER 11: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30th
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