From Risks Digest:

A few days ago in Ekaterinburg city, in the Ural region in Russia, a man
deposited 2000 rubles ($74 USD) in an ATM. Sounds ordinary so far, however
the ATM credited his account with 2 billion rubles (yes, *billion*, with a
B). When he informs the bank of this error, the clerk responds that he
doesn’t care, he has other things to do!

The software error was probably quite unusual, hard to reproduce, and exceedingly rare. As a result, someone decided that it was an acceptable risk because if or when it occurred, the error would obviously be noticed and corrected during the bank’s normal reconciliation process. The reconciliation process, however, was obviously not being performed regularly enough (if at all). To make matters worse, when the account holder tries to activate yet another compensating control and explicitly flag the error, the bank still doesn’t react.

Now imagine if the guy had known anything about money laundering and wire transfers. He could have launched a series of wire transfers through the Baltics which would have put the money beyond the reach of the Russian bank and authorities in a matter of days. The poor operational processes and general lack of financial transparency and regulation in the post-Soviet countries mean that it’s still quite easy for large sums of money to effectively disappear–yet another compensating control that people assume must exist but in reality doesn’t.