An office worker in Chile quit his job after being paid more than 300 times his monthly salary, then won a court battle when his bosses tried to get the money back.
The man, who worked as an assistant at food company Dan Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos de Chile, usually earned around 500,000 pesos (£386) a month.
But in May 2022, his employer accidentally deposited 165 million pesos, worth about £127,000, into his account.
The firm claimed he initially agreed to return the cash during a meeting with HR.
However, three days later, he handed in his resignation, triggering a legal fight that dragged on for three years.
Managers accused him of theft, a charge that could have seen him fined and jailed for up to 540 days.
But a judge in Santiago dismissed the case, ruling it was not theft but ‘unauthorised collection,’ which meant it was not a crime for the court to prosecute.
The company says it remains determined to recover the funds.
‘We will take all possible legal steps, particularly an application for annulment, to have the ruling reviewed,’ it said in a statement to Diario Financiero.
The office worker quit his job after his employers paid him more than 300 times his normal monthly salary
It comes after another extraordinary salary blunder in Europe.
A teacher in Germany remained on full pay for 16 years while on sick leave, without anyone at her school noticing.
The woman, who taught biology and geography, first went off work in August 2009 due to illness and mental health problems.
She was supposed to be reviewed by a doctor after three months, but the check never took place, and her leave was repeatedly extended.
She continued to receive her full £48,000 salary while absent, despite not teaching a single class at the vocational school in Wesel, near Duisburg, since 2009.
The error only came to light during an internal audit in 2024, when new management realised she had been quietly collecting her wages for nearly two decades.
When officials ordered her to undergo a medical examination, she refused and even launched legal action against her bosses.
Reports say she owns two apartments in Duisburg, the city where she once taught before disappearing from the staff roster.
Dorothee Feller, the education minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, told Bild: ‘I have a lot of questions because I’ve never been confronted with a case like this before.’