A Louisiana woman has been arrested after she refused to return the $1.2 million that was accidentally deposited into her brokerage account. Kelyn Spadoni was charged with the theft of more than $25,000, bank fraud and the illegal transmission of monetary funds when taken into custody on April 7 in New Orleans, Nola.com reports. The intended deposit should have been $82, not more than a million.
- Spadoni, 33, worked as a 911 dispatcher. She was employed by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office at the time of her crime, which was only possible because  Charles Schwab & Co. accidentally deposited $1.2 million instead of $82 into her brokerage account. She immediately moved the money out of the account in an attempt to keep it from being taken back.
- That money was not hers. I feel like it should be pretty obvious to say that if you don’t have millions of dollars but they suddenly turn up in your bank account one day, there’s been a transactional error and that money will disappear as quickly as it’s been given. However, that didn’t stop Spadoni from starting to spend it right away. “It’s not her money,” said Capt. Jason Rivarde, a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson. “She has no legal claim to that money. Even if it was put in there by mistake. It was an accounting error.”
- She hasn’t only been charged by the police, she’s being sued as well. She’s facing a federal lawsuit from Charles Schwab & Co. with the company accusing Spadoni of ignoring their calls, text messages, and emails they sent in an attempt to get their money back. They claim that after she opened her account in January, the company installed a software “enhancement” to make transferring assets easier. However, things went badly wrong when their attempt to transfer $82.56 into a Fidelity Brokerage Services account Spadoni owned ended up with $1,205,619 being transferred instead. When they tried to recover it the following day, they received a message that the funds were no longer available as Spadoni had moved them.
- Spadoni wasn’t shy about her spending. After moving the ill-begotten cash out of her account, she started buying pretty quickly. She not only purchased a new house but also used some of the money to purchase a 2021 Hyundai Genesis which starts at $48,000 and goes up to about $70,000. So far, police have only been able to recover about 75% of the money.
