• On December 10, a North Texas woman named Ruth Balloon checked her bank account to find $37 million extra funds, CBS 11 reported.
  • The extra money was deposited into her account after a bank representative mistakenly entered the accounting number into the deposit amount field instead, according to the report.
  • Though the bank has since taken back the money, Balloon told local reporters that if she did have that much money, she would donate some of it and invest some in real estate.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Ever wondered what it would be like to be a millionaire for a day? Well, one North Texas woman just found out.

On December 10, Ruth Balloon checked her bank account balance after working a shift at the Dallas shoe store Roma Boots, local news outlet CBS 11 reported. Balloon, whose account is with LegacyTexas Bank, found her balance was a little different than she expected – as in, about $37 million higher than usual. For context, $37 million is the amount rock band U2 made in all of 2019, according to Forbes– $1 million more than hip-hop group Migos and only $500,000 less than Celine Dion.

“I was like, ‘wow, we have a lot of money’!” Balloon told CBS 11.

After telling her husband, he then called the bank to ask about the extra deposited funds, only to find out that it was simply a clerical error. The bank apologized for the mistake, and then promptly took away the money, as expected.

"I got the text message from Ruth saying, 'Hey, do you know there's $37 million in our bank account?" her husband, Brian Balloon, told Star Telegram."I was like, 'What?'"

In a statement given to CBS 11, LegacyTexas Bank said that one of their representatives had accidentally entered the wrong number (Balloon's account number) into the deposit amount field. Star Telegram reported that earlier in the week, Balloon had tried to convert $1,300 in Canadian money to American dollars. At LegacyTexas, foreign currency transactions are required to be manually entered - hence the mishap.

"Due to the fluctuation in exchange rates, all foreign currency transactions must be manually entered into our system through our back office. When our client's deposit was being keyed in, our representative entered her account number into the amount field by mistake," their statement read. "Although our client brought the error to our attention and the transaction was immediately reversed, less the amount of her original deposit, it would have been caught and corrected during our evening processing. Rest assured, our systems are sound, and this manual entry error has been addressed."

In speaking with Star Telegram, Brian wondered how a modern bank such as LegacyTexas could not have a fail-safe in place to prevent this from happening. "There's no alert or anything on their banking side," he said. "that says, 'No, it is a lot of money to print into an amount area for a personal account'?"

Either way, being a millionaire for about a day gave the Balloons time to ponder what they would have done with such funds.

"First I was going to do 10% tithing," Ruth Balloon told CBS 11. "Then I was going to donate some money, and then I would have invested in real estate."