Google accidentally transferred a quarter of a million dollars to a hacker

By: Elena Shcherban | 18.09.2022, 21:44

A funny incident happened to Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs: he unexpectedly received a quarter of a million dollars payment from Google for nothing.

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Last month, Sam received a $249,999.99 amount from the company. He admitted that he was doing bug bounty for companies, including Google, but the corporation had nothing to pay him, and such a large amount of money.

The bug-hunter didn't waste the money and instead tried to contact Google by writing a letter and informing them about the bug. However, about three weeks passed and no one from the company responded to him. As a result, Sam decided to tell the story on Twitter. He even planned to open a special account for the money so he wouldn't have to pay taxes on it.

The story of the honest hacker was published by the media and NPR was able to get a comment from Google. Representatives of the company explained that, indeed, there was a mistake, because of which the money was transferred to the wrong person. The company did not specify to whom and for what they were intended, but said they intended to look into it and return the transferred amount.

As of Thursday afternoon, Sam said the money was still in his account. So it begs the question, Google, maybe you have nowhere to spend that quarter million dollars. So we have some ideas.

Source: @samwcyo, NPR