His company accidentally paid him 330 times his salary due to HR error. He did what anyone would do

Getting a little extra on the payday is always great, especially for those who live paycheck to paycheck.  However, in 2022, one man in Chile received a bonus of a lifetime, which was about 330 times his salary. Turns out, it wasn't actually a bonus but a payroll error from HR, as per reports. Sadly, the poor worker was told to return the money, but he had other plans. 

A Payday of a Lifetime

The unnamed man worked at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos (Cial), a maker of cold cuts, as per Diario Financiero. The worker normally received a paycheck of roughly 500,000 Chilean pesos (about $555 at the time) which was directly deposited into his account by the company.

However, as per the Santiago-based newspaper, one lucky day the man got a check for a whopping 165,398,851 Chilean Pesos (about $183,593 at the time). The surprised worker did the right thing and notified the overpayment to his manager who discovered the HR error. 

The worker was promptly told to initiate a return and he promised to do that the next day. However, the man never reached the bank, prompting the company to launch a manhunt. When they finally got through, the worker made an excuse that he overslept and he would soon do the transfer, IOL reported. 

Days later, the man disappeared from the face of the Earth. After three days of relentless calls and messages, the company finally received an update. Cial got a message from a lawyer representing the worker, offering the resignation on his behalf.

While the company didn't accept it, the man has been untraceable ever since. The company filed a complaint accusing the worker of misappropriation of funds, in hopes of recovering some of the amount. 

"He was informed and clarified that this money did not correspond to the payment of any service," the Chilean legal documents read, as per Diario Financiero.

Six months later, in December 2022, IOL shared an update that the man was still on the run and police had made no arrests so far. 

Getting surprise money is not that uncommon after all. Back in 2020, a firefighter from Indiana got a similar shock when he found about $8 million sitting in his bank account. Charles Calvin who was expecting a stimulus check of $1,700 from the Internal Revenue Service, could not believe his eyes when he checked his account balance. 

He asked his colleague, a fellow firefighter, to check it. “I ran the card again, and again for $8.2 million. I said Man, something is up with this,” he told NBC Chicago in an interview. He even asked the clerk at the gas station where the ATM was to check if something was wrong with the machine. 

However, Calvin wasn't as dubious as the Chilean man and he informed his bank soon after the error. He told WGN-TV that the money was gone soon after reporting the error. “You go from being a millionaire one second then back to being broke again,” he said. In the end, he was happy to get the amount of money that he was promised.

This article originally appeared two months ago.