Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The College Student Who Woke Up Rich - The Sibongile Mani story

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

This South African woman Sibongile Mani finds a lot of money in her student financial aid account

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My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu original series. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for Bumno subscribers. Terms apply. So this woman wakes up one day and she's suddenly rich. She just found $770,000 in her bank account that she didn't put there.

So what is she going to do with it? Now the woman will just call her McDuck. And McDuck is in college trying to get a degree and she's fortunate enough to receive financial aid for like food and essentials. And it's not very much but she makes it work. But one day all that changes because McDuck wakes up in the morning and checks her student bank account to see if her financial aid has hit the account. And that is when, bam, she sees that her balance is 14 million RAND, which is about 770,000 U.S. dollars. See, McDuck gets

a monthly allowance from the school. And she's supposed to get 1,400 RAND, but that's not what she gets. She gets 14 million, which is an obvious accounting error. Now, the currency's in RAND, but from And this point on, I'm just going to convert everything to US dollars, because that's just easier for me. So McDuck looks at the $770,000 in her account, and she thinks, not that, oh, this must be a clerical mistake. I should probably contact someone at the financial aid office and get this all sorted out. No, no. Instead, she thinks, wow, this must be free money.

Whatever am I going to buy first? And of course, that's when she starts spending it. Now here's where it gets tricky, because it's government aid and you can't really spend it like real money. It's basically like a food voucher that they put on a student card. So she has to go and find like a shop and work out some kind of shady back alley deal to exchange the student card for cash somehow. But whatever, she does it and she figures it out. And she exchanges the student card for some cash and she starts spending it on herself. She gets herself a fancy new Peruvian weave. She buys herself expensive clothes. She buys herself the latest iPhone, of course. She takes

a luxury trip to see a big horse race in Durban. Oh, but it doesn't stop there because she goes and throws these crazy parties for herself and for her friends with DJs and top shelf alcohol and everybody's showing up. She throws an expensive party for her cousin's birthday. And she throws an expensive baby shower for her friend at a champagne bar. So she's not just spending this money on herself. She's hooking her friends up too and not just by throwing them parties. She buys her friends a bunch of new clothes and gets them the latest iPhones. And she and her crew are all walking around campus like they're straight up Beyonce. So the cash is flowing and McDuck has this big Cinderella glow up and she's finally living the baller lifestyle that she's always wanted. All because

she somehow woke up with all this free financial aid in her bank account. And to make this situation even funnier, at the university, McDuck just happens to be studying accounting. Until two and a half months go by, and McDuck is still living large, with all this money in her student bank account. And she is not hiding it. On average, she's spending around $600 a day on just dumb shit. But then she screws it all up. Because one day, she goes shopping at the local grocery store, and she buys some food with her student card like she normally would. And she leaves the store, and I guess she forgets to take the receipt with her.

And that receipt shows the balance of her student financial aid account, a balance that's now $730,000. Then later, someone at the grocery store, we don't know who, this person finds the receipt and they look at it like, damn, how's this student have $730,000 in their student bank account? Because they know it's money that they're supposed to be using for food and books and stuff. $730,000, that's a lot of food and books. And so this person takes a picture of this receipt.

And they posted on social media and soon, this person, post blows up and if that isn't bad enough the receipt has McDuck's name printed right on it so the students at this university they're looking at this viral picture and they're looking at McDuck walking around campus with a brand new iPhone and a brand new Peruvian weave and they start putting two and two together and they start wondering if she's pulling some kind of financial aid scheme and at least one of those students reports all of this to the university and the university investigates it and they report it to the police and then

And soon enough, bam! Police arrest McDuck. And I don't have a mugshot of her, but here's how she looks in real life. And they end up charging her with theft and fraud, which seems a little harsh. But she goes to court, she's found guilty, and she's sentenced to five years in prison. But luckily, she appeals the ruling. And the sentence is ultimately suspended. But she's also ordered to do community service and attend counseling.

And for some reason, she doesn't have to pay back the $40,000 that she spent. So, hell yeah, free money. Shout out to South Africa.