God Was Just Giving Him a Tithe

January 23, 2009 By 15 Comments

Randy Pratt and his wife Melissa Pratt were supposed to receive a $1,772.50 deposit in their bank account.

Apparently, the bank was running low on decimals and the couple received a deposit of $177,250 instead.

They didn’t tell anyone about this. They simply “withdrew the money, quit their jobs and moved to Florida.”

Now, they’re on trial.

What was he thinking, you might ask?

Easy:

He said he considered the money “a gift from God.”

Of course he did… I love how that’s a line of defense for the guy.

But just in case…

God, I will believe you exist if you deposit all sorts of moola in this account.

I also want these.

(By the way, if you want to have more fun with decimals, the math teacher side of me says you need to listen to this excellently hilarious clip.)

(Thanks to Sean for the link!)

Filed Under: General 15 Comments
  • Aaron

    I received a mysterious tax rebate check from the Federal Guvmint for $5500 a few years back. As much as I would have like to keep it, I called my accountant who straightened it out with the IRS. I had to destroy it. Sure beats going to jail!

  • http://learninfreedom.org/ tokenadult

    A Minnesota school district employee cashed a mistaken state check for a million dollars (her account number was one digit different from some big hospital, or something like that) and spent a lot of the money. She did not fare well in the legal system.

  • CybrgnX

    I would not give it back but not for the obvious reason. I leant long ago (in the military) that the quickest way to get your accounts screwed up is to tell BigBrother He made an error. Put the money in a seperate account and wait for BibBrother to tell you there was an error. Then give it back. Yes trying to keep it is a VERY big error as the two found out.

  • Siamang

    Wow! That audio recording was almost impossible to listen to.

    There’s something magical about people who are too incompetent to do simple math tasks, yet who are 100% self-assured that they’re right.

    And then throwing bureacracy right on top of it, man that sucks!

  • http://gretachristina.typepad.com/ Greta Christina

    You know, I realize that I say this every time there’s a very public example of laughably blatant immorality on the part of believers. But what the heck, I’m going to say it anyway:

    It’s a good thing they’re not atheists.

    Because if they were atheists, they’d have no basis for morality, no way to distinguish right from wrong, and no motivation to do good.

    (rolling eyes and sticking out tongue — anyone have an emoticon for that?)

  • http://rgzblog.blogspot.com rgz

    Yes I know we are supposed to give back the money, but you know if the bank suddenly decided you owe them a million bucks “by mistake” you would be royally screwed and no jebus would get you outta that hell, the thought alone drives me mad.

    Ain’t we entitled to some sort of compensation for the burden of finding out the error and notifying the them?

    I hate bankers with passion.

  • Leanstrum

    That Verizon video was torture. But I just had to listen to the whole 27 minutes in the hope that the penny would finally drop. But it didn’t. Shame.

    How can so many people at one company be so incompetent in the one thing they’re supposed to understand? Verizon really needs to do a course on the difference between dollars and cents.

  • Richard Wade

    I suppose the “I thought it was a gift from God” defense is not much worse than the “The Devil made me do it” defense.

    I’ve received checks like this. One phone call and they happily correct the error. And no, you’re not entitled to compensation for finding the error and doing the right thing. Be good for goodness sake, remember?

  • http://www.yfc.org Justin

    Well I agree with the part where you say he was in the wrong. Sure, taking that money wasn’t his……and because there is a law he will pay. However, we are all screwed up. Have you not made a poor choice and paid for it? This guys example is bad, but ya know what I don’t know a man who has a perfect example. That proves nothing. However, I see your point, too many Christians use “God did this for me” as a crutch to avoid reality. It’s the biggest progmatic problem in the world. Bad witness.

  • J. J. Ramsey

    Greta Christina: “(rolling eyes and sticking out tongue — anyone have an emoticon for that?)”

    Here’s at least the tongue out-sticking part: :P

    (Just follow a colon “:” with a capital “P”.)

  • Sock

    What I most like about this story is that the couple quit their jobs, and moved to Florida.

    I wonder if they also withdrew all the money and closed their bank account.

    “Gift from God” my ass.

  • Lynn

    How do you quit your jobs and move to Florida on less than $200K ?

    This is the ugly, twisted fallout of all that bogus “prosperity theology” that gets preached by the likes of the Osteens and Joyce Meyer, et al. I’ve even seen it creeping into mainstream denominations, even Catholicism lately.

    It’s usually denounced by the mainstream denominations, but I am no longer surprised by how fast the most seemingly “devout” people can spin their god into a sugar daddy if it suits their purposes.

    I hope most people, atheist or otherwise, are well read enough and smart enough to know that no one ever gets away with this, even though it’s the bank’s mistake. No one. You’d probably have a higher chance of success robbing a bank the old fashioned way — stocking masks and guns.

  • Emanuel Goldstein

    God only wanted ten per cent from the Hebrews.

    The Secular State takes fifty per cent when you add city, state, federal, social security, property tax, sales tax, and soon to come mandatory health insurance, fines, penalities for being a little late, etc.

    LOL!

  • Emanuel Goldstein

    Lynn, you are right on!

    If the bank makes a mistake, good luck proving it.

    If you do, tough cookies.

    No one crosses the STATE SANCTIONED banks.

    The Secular State is God, and soon to get even more powerful.

  • http://www.noonespecial.ca/cacophony Tao Jones

    Wow.. that Verizon thing is depressing, but sadly common. The woman at the end was particularly dense. The caller wasn’t always explaining himself clearly either.

    I’ve had a bunch of similar customer service encounters.

    Virgin was repairing my cell phone and in the process they lost track of it. After repeated calls they gave me the contact information for their repair centre. The repair centre couldn’t find the phone either. Then it turned out this place didn’t even repair phones for Virgin at all and another company did it. So I had to track down the company that fixed Virgin phones myself. I contacted them and they said they had the phone but were waiting for Virgin to authorize them to fix it. Back to Virgin they had no idea what I was talking about because obviously their “system” is infallible. In the end I had to do the work to connect two managers, one from Virgin and one from the real repair centre to get my phone fixed. It wasn’t just that I ended up knowing more about the repair process than Virgin’s supervisors did, it was that these supervisors were flat out wrong.

    I really should have recorded my conversations with DHL during another incident. Basically one of their drivers didn’t even bother trying to deliver a package to me for 3 days. I eventually got the issue escalated to a director and I tore a strip off her. She called me back 15 minutes later saying she found someone to bring me the package and they’d arrive in 30 minutes. When the guy finally showed up he had a big smile on his face.. he was just a data entry clerk who was given the evening off if he drove my parcel to me.