Asshole of the Week

Hey kids, in case you haven't noticed, Powerball is up to $200 million bucks. That's pre-tax, of course, and only if you take the annuity payouts. Heck, even if you take the lump-sum, that's over $100 million before taxes, and you're still gonna clear in the mid-to-upper eight figures. Yahtzee!

Okay, so odds are, we're not gonna win Powerball. That won't keep us from buying a few tickets, of course. Heck, we wouldn't mind winning the $200,000 for matching five of the six numbers. Wouldn't that be great? Two hundred thousand smackaroos. Wed just have them direct deposit our winnings so the next day, we'd magically have $200,000 in "available funds" show up next time we log on to our online banking account. Maybe that's what Altoona couple Herbert and Becky Starbird thought had happened when an extra $280,276.76 magically appeared in their bank account. But no, not so much.

The Starbirds' apparent good fortune, as it turns out, was a colossal fuckup an erroneous deposit by their bank. And now the Starbirds are in deep trouble for it, as they've been arrested and charged with theft. When the money appeared, the Starbirds claim, they tried to alert the bank to the error, but the bank insisted there was no mistake. So they did what any dumbass reasonable person would do: they started spending the money. Well, the bank claims that the Starbirds never actually informed it of the mistake, so it's pressing charges against the couple.

Now, that $280,000 had to come from somewhere so we're guessing the bank figured out the error when some (very, very unhappy) customer threw a fit about their account being a few hundred thousand dollars short. (Needless to say, we won't be taking our money to First Commonwealth Bank anytime soon.) But ya know, we guess we can understand that mistakes can happen. Someone writes an incorrect digit in the "account number" field on a wire transfer slip, or the clerk mistakes the "3" for an "8."

What we don't know is what possesses someone who "finds" a crapload of money to just start spending it, without giving thought to the fact that the money might belong to someone, and that someone is probably going to want it back. In fact, we're pretty sure there was a book about that exact situation, which was made into a movie that did pretty well. Maybe the Starbirds aren't fans of the Coen Brothers. Maybe they should be thankful that it's only the bank pressing charges, and not Javier Bardem hunting them down.

We guess the Starbirds thought they'd encountered some dumb luck, but we think they're just dumb, so they're our Assholes of the Week.

Image Credit: Flickr user Tracy O