Users of an ATM machine at a Tesco branch recently felt as though they won the lottery. It seems that a problem occurred with an ATM and the machine was giving out free cash. Anyone that was using the ATM for this brief period of time would insert their credit card and get back twice the amount of money that they asked for.
News of the malfunction spread like the plague with people calling family and friends and telling them of their good fortune. It seems that they had about fifty people in a queue before anyone from Tesco noticed. Witnesses to the debacle said people were using multiple credit cards and debit cards to pull money out of the ATM.
It seems that there was an internal operational problem with the cash machine that allowed it to provide the free money. If people were asking for twenty pounds the cash machine gave them forty pounds. Once this error was discovered the ATM machine was immediately closed down.
The UK supermarket and financial services provider made a statement that they would not try to recover the free money that customers were awarded. An eyewitness said it was a real frenzy around the cash machine, with people calling everyone they knew.
