Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Found a Real Life Infinite Money Glitch - The Dan Saunders Story

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

In 2011, Dan Saunders, a 29-year-old bartender from Wangaratta, Australia, discovered a glitch in the National Australia Bank's ATM system that allowed him to withdraw money beyond his account balance.

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and one night in 2011 he's out at a bar, drinking, you know, having a good time and Dan suddenly realizes that he's out of cash. And so he leaves and he walks to the nearest ATM and there he tries to transfer $200 from his credit card to his savings account. But for some reason, the transfer doesn't work. The ATM screen keeps saying transaction cancelled. And then it like spits his card back at him. So Dan is like, well, that's weird. And so he tries again. But this time, he tries to withdraw $200 directly from his savings account.

And it works. The thing is, he didn't really have $200 in his savings account. It's some kind of glitch that's going on. And Dan, he's a bit drunk, and so he doesn't really question what just happened. And he's like, all right, I got the money. I'm going back to the bar. And he leaves, and he goes and he drinks more. Later, when he leaves the bar, he ends up walking by that same ATM again.

And he's like, I wonder if I can make that glitch work again. And so he transfers another $200 from his credit card to his savings account. And once again, he's able to pull out the cash. So then he's like, all right, I'm going to try more. And so he tries again with $500. And that works. And then $600. And that works.

And so at this point, Dan's thinking, did I just discover an infinite money glitch? And so he does it a few more times and he takes all the cash and he goes home. Now, I don't want to get into the weeds of how this glitch works, but after testing it so many times, Dan eventually figures out that as long as he transfers a bit of money from his credit card every night, his bank balance will stay positive. And he can just transfer money into his own account forever. Or, you know, at least until he gets caught. And so that's what he ends up doing.

Over and over again, he's at the ATM every night taking out thousands of dollars. In the first two weeks alone, he takes out more than $20,000 little by little each night. Because for some reason, the glitch will only work between one and three in the morning when the ATMs go offline. But every day, he keeps expecting the police to come banging on his door. But every day, he's surprised that it doesn't happen. and a few weeks go by. And the bank, they haven't seemed to notice. They haven't reached out or anything.

He even goes to the bank in person, I guess to check if they're suspicious, or if he's been flagged. But no one brings anything up. So he keeps going. Every night between one and three in the morning, he's there transferring money from his credit card to his savings and then into cash from the ATF. And pretty quickly, he's made so many transfers and withdrawals that he technically becomes a millionaire. And this is when Dan is finally like,

all right, fuck it. I'm just going to live my life like a baller. And he starts spending big. He's eating in nice restaurants. He starts staying in luxury hotels. He's going on vacations. Like here he is in Paris. He's buying himself clothes.

He rents a private jet for $90,000 to take him and his friends to an exotic island in Asia for a weekend. He gambles a lot because, you know, he's really into that. And, you know, just because Dan is a nice guy, sometimes he's generous. Sometimes he'll tip waiters like hundreds of dollars, or he'll pay for hotel rooms for homeless people to spend the night in. And so bro is living like a millionaire now. And according to him, this, you know, it really helped him with the ladies.

So, you know, that's nice too. Now, people obviously don't know he's taking advantage of this weird ATM glitch. His close friends know, but, you know, other people don't. But they do ask him how he's getting all this money. and he tells them that he like works in real estate or that he's an investment banker and I guess no one really questions it. And so Dan just keeps having the time of his life. But here's where it all gets complicated for him. While he's out here having a lot of fun with his money and whatnot and he and his friends are partying a lot,

he's also the kind of guy who's never done anything bad his whole life, at least nothing criminal like this. And slowly but surely he becomes super. paranoid that he's gonna get caught. Every day he wakes up wondering, is this the day that they're gonna catch me? Is this the day that this all falls apart? Like bros having nightmares over here about the SWAT team standing outside his door to bust him. And like every time his phone rings, he half expects it to be the bank telling him, we know what you did, Dan, and you're in big trouble. But it never is. When the bank does call him, it's just them confirming some transactions he made for security reasons, like nothing out of the ordinary.

Dan knows that he could go on the run. Like, he could take millions of dollars and just disappear into some foreign, exotic country. But then he might end up a fugitive, and he'll be constantly running from the law. And he'll never be able to go home and, like, see his family or his friends again. And so honestly, you know, this has been fun, but he's just tired of being paranoid all the time, and he's at his limit. And so, after four months of exploiting a random glitch in his bank's ATMs, Dan finally just stops. In total, over the four months, he was able to withdraw and spend more than $1.6 million Australian dollars, or about $1 million U.S. dollars.

And instead of moving on with his life, Old Honest Dan actually calls up the bank and he explains everything to them and he confesses. But here's where it gets kind of weird. The bank more or less tells him that they can't do much about it right now, but that they'll report him to the police and that the police will be contacting him soon and he's going to be in so much trouble. And Dan, you know, he knew this would happen. And so he waits. And he waits. And he waits. But the police never contact him.

And three years go by. And it's now 2014. And still, nothing has happened to him. The bank never follows up and the police never reach out. Now, at this point, most people would probably just like shrug it off and move on or be grateful to. but they got away with it, but not Dan. Dan, he's actually having trouble moving on. He's got a lot of anxiety and guilt from this whole experience,

so much so that he starts seeing a psychiatrist to help him get through it. And I guess that psychiatrist recommends that in order to make himself feel better, he should consider turning himself in to the police. But Dan doesn't do that. I mean, he spent all this time thinking the police were going to contact him, and they never did. And so he actually comes up with a better ID. he's gonna go public.

He starts doing interviews and making TV appearances and telling his story that way. Because, you know, it's a really interesting story. Once he goes public, the police, they still don't reach out or do anything. And one of the producers of a TV show that he was interviewed on, actually low-key calls the police

and turns Dan in. And it turns out, police had never been investigating him. It seems like the bank didn't actually report him at all like they said that they were going to do. And if he hadn't gone on TV and told the world what he did, he probably never would have been caught. But it seems like he kind of wanted to get caught. You know, he was like feeling just way too guilty about it. But anyway, and so, bam, Dan is arrested.

And I don't have a mugshot, but here's a picture of him in real life. Here's what's weird, though. He actually goes to trial and no one understands how the glitch happened or how Dan managed to trick the ATM into giving him millions. Like the prosecutor doesn't understand it, the judge doesn't understand it. Even the bank can't fully explain how their own system let this happen. And I guess because of that, they can't give Dan a very harsh sentence, so he only gets one year in prison. It's kind of worth it though, huh?