A YEAR behind bars for a five-month bender where you spunk around £1m of someone else’s money on booze, private jets and parties for you and all your mates?
Tough one….
Maybe bartender Dan Saunders could give some advice having done the bender… and the time.
The Australian’s incredible transformation from £13-an-hour barman to ‘rock star’ came after he innocently stumbled upon an ATM glitch late one night.
The hiccup allowed him to withdraw unlimited cash, leading him to go wild and splash out on a jet-set lifestyle and fine-dining.
The ATM allowed him to draw out significantly more than his account balance and after a bit of ‘trial and error’ he figured out that the ATM disconnected from the bank and the internet between 1am and 3am, which exposed a loophole to unlimited cash.
He continued experimenting with higher amounts and within a few days he was withdrawing massive sums of money.
Dan told Vice: “I transferred $200 (£117) from my credit account to my savings, and it said ‘transaction cancelled’ and spat the card out. I thought that was super odd, so I decided to try and get $200 out of my savings account just to see what would happen.
“It gave me the money so I went back to the bar and continued drinking.
“After I left the bar I was walking home past the same ATM. I’d been thinking about how odd the whole thing was so I put the card in again and started playing around. I transferred another $200 and got the money out. Then $500, then $600, just to see what would happen. I think it was a combination of being tipsy and bored but I just pushed the envelope and tried again and again. It was like a magic trick.”
He figured out he just had to stay a day ahead to pocket millions.
“So on the first day I spent $2,000, but on the second day I transferred $4,000 to make sure my balance didn’t stay negative. The transfer at night would go through, then reverse one day later.
“But if you stayed ahead of that reversal by doing another one, you could trick the system into thinking you had millions. It was numbers on a screen going back and forth like yo-yos.”
For months, Dan revelled in his newfound wealth, generously paying off his friends’ student loans, chartering private flights, and even paying for homeless people to have a place to stay for the night.
Dan hired expensive escorts as he partied his life away, all while quaffing caviar and champagne.
He once hired a minibus to stop at all the backpacker hostels in Melbourne to pick up revellers.
He then drove them out to a big estate he hired out in the beautiful Yarra Valley where he held pool parties.
He confessed: “I felt like a rockstar. The bank called occasionally to verify transactions, but they never picked up on the glitch. I later went to the bank, who told me my balance was $1 million. I felt like a caveman discovering fire.”
As time passed, Dan became increasingly anxious about his runaway spending. He eventually confessed to the bank about his activities, who warned him of serious consequences and notified the police.
However, two years passed without any action from the authorities. Stricken with guilt and anxiety, Dan consulted a psychiatrist and voluntarily handed himself over to the authorities after sharing his story on national television and with the press.
In 2015, Dan, who said he may have fled to Majorca if he hadn’t decided to turn himself in, finally ended up in court and was sentenced to 12 months in jail on charges of theft and fraud, followed by an 18-month community corrections order after his release.
He has since resumed his job as a bartender and is now penning his life story, which is being adapted into a film.
He later said: “I’m slowly getting back to neutral. I felt like Macaulay Culkin after Home Alone 2: like you’re hot one minute, and then you’re sort of not the next and it’s a bit hard to take. There was definitely a hangover time when I thought jeez, maybe I should have gone to Spain after all.”
