Google Accidentally Sends Bored Ape Engineer $250,000

Lucky for them, he's trying to give it back.

Wrong Button

Everybody makes mistakes. Even Google. And sometimes, apparently, Google's mistakes include accidentally handing a self-described hacker and BAYC-creating Yuga Labs security engineer nearly $250k.

According to a tweet from Sam Curry, the engineer in question, the mystery payment appeared in his bank account a few weeks ago. Figuring it was likely an error on Google's end, he filed a customer support request. When Google failed to respond to the ticket, the engineer decided to take the issue to the internet.

"It's been a little over 3 weeks since Google randomly sent me $249,999 and I still haven’t heard anything on the support ticket," Curry wrote in a tweet, complete with a screenshot of the transaction. "Is there any way we could get in touch @Google?"

"It's OK if you don’t want it back," he continued.

Human Error

It turns out Curry's hunch was right. Google indeed meant to give someone else a quarter million bones, but accidentally wired the payment to the wrong person. Kind of like sending a text to the wrong number — except, in this case, it was a massive pile of cash.

"Our team recently made a payment to the wrong party as the result of human error," a Google spokesperson told CNN. "We appreciate that it was quickly communicated to us by the impacted partner, and we are working to correct it."

Lucky Strike

Now, before any Google users out there get their hopes up, Curry wasn't a total rando that the search engine plucked from its many millions of site surfers. As Curry explained to NPR, he does bug bounty hunting — basically, freelance cybersecurity work — for several companies outside of Yuga Labs, including for Google.

In other words, Curry was somewhere in the company's payroll system, and some unlucky staffer just hit the wrong name. Anyway, props to the engineer for alerting Google to the error, and our sympathies to whoever made the mistake on Google's end. We're sure this probably doesn't happen that often, given Google's size and sophistication. Or at the very least, pretty sure it doesn't.

READ MORE: Google mistakenly sent an engineer almost $250,000 [CNN]