First published July 2, 2022.
In May 2022 a dispatch assistant at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos (Cial), one of Chile's biggest cold-meat producers, found 165,398,851 Chilean pesos in his bank account instead of his usual monthly pay of about 500,000 pesos. That is roughly 330 times his salary, not the "286 times" that appeared in many English-language headlines. According to the company, he promised to return the money, then stopped coming to work and resigned through a lawyer. Cial took him to court, but in September 2025 a Santiago court acquitted him, and an appeal by the company was later rejected.
Here is how the error happened, what each side said, why the criminal case failed, and what the story teaches about payroll mistakes.
What happened in May 2022
Cial owns several well-known Chilean brands, including San Jorge, La Preferida and Winter. In May 2022 an administrative error in its human resources department sent the worker a deposit of a little over 165 million pesos together with his May salary. Peruvian broadcaster Panamericana put the sum at about US$173,000, against a normal salary of roughly US$520 a month; English-language reports at the time quoted about £148,000.
The arithmetic matters because the most shared version of the story got it wrong. Dividing 165,398,851 by 500,000 gives about 331. Chilean outlets, including The Clinic and later coverage of the trial, describe the payment as 330 times his salary. The 286 figure seems to have come from early English-language reports and does not match the amounts they themselves quoted.
The story first broke in the Chilean business paper Diario Financiero in June 2022 and spread worldwide within days, helped by a headline that practically wrote itself.
The company's account
According to Cial, the problem was noticed quickly. The company says the worker himself reported the unusual deposit to his supervisor, and that he was told the money did not correspond to any work or service. Cial says he agreed to go to his bank and return the excess with a vale vista, a bank draft commonly used in Chile, made out to the company.
The company's version is that he then failed to appear the next day, and that calls, text messages and WhatsApp messages went unanswered. About a month after the deposit, in early June 2022, he resurfaced through a lawyer, who delivered a letter of voluntary resignation. Cial filed a criminal complaint and asked the courts to lift his bank secrecy so the money could be traced; the company later said the full amount had been moved out of the account.
The worker never gave a public interview, and most of what was reported in 2022 came from the employer and its legal filings. That is worth remembering when reading the early coverage, which presented the company's version as the whole story.
Three years in court
Cial first accused him of apropiación indebida, the Chilean offence of misappropriating money or property that was handed over with an obligation to return it. Prosecutors ultimately pursued a charge of hurto por hallazgo, roughly "theft by finding", which covers keeping property that someone has lost.
On 8 September 2025, more than three years after the deposit, the First Court of Guarantee of Santiago (Primer Juzgado de Garantía de Santiago) acquitted him. Cial's lawyer, Leonardo Battaglia, told The Clinic that the judge accepted the facts but found they did not amount to the crime charged, which he called a serious error. The company filed a recurso de nulidad, asking the Santiago Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict and impose a short prison sentence and a fine.
That appeal also failed. CNN Chile reported that the Court of Appeals rejected Cial's challenge and upheld the acquittal. In the court's reasoning, the company had made the transfer voluntarily, even if the amount was wrong, and the money could not be treated as "apparently lost", which the theft-by-finding offence requires. The dispute, the court said, belongs to civil law as a case of pago de lo no debido, payment of something that was not owed.
Why the criminal case failed but the debt question did not vanish
Many readers assume that keeping money paid by mistake must be theft. Chilean courts drew a finer line. Criminal law punishes specific conduct, and each offence has precise elements. Misappropriation generally requires that property was entrusted to someone under a duty to return it; theft by finding requires property that appears to be lost. A deliberate bank transfer from an employer, made in error, fit neither description in the judges' view.
That does not mean the money became the worker's to keep. Like most legal systems, Chile's civil law recognises that a person who receives a payment that was not owed can be required to give it back. The courts' rulings closed the criminal route, not the question of the debt. Whether Cial has pursued a civil claim, and with what result, has not been widely reported.
The case also shows how slowly such disputes move. A mistake made in a single payroll run in 2022 was still being argued in court in late 2025, long after the viral headlines had been forgotten.
How payroll errors like this happen
Large overpayments usually come from small slips: an extra digit typed into a field, a figure pasted into the wrong column, a bonus or settlement entered against the wrong employee, or a file uploaded twice. Most companies use several safeguards to catch these before money leaves the account:
- Two-person approval for any payment above a set amount.
- Automatic alerts when a payment differs sharply from the employee's usual pay.
- Reconciliation of the payroll total against the expected total before release.
- Fast recall procedures with the bank, since transfers are easiest to reverse in the first hours.
Cial's case is an extreme example of what happens when those checks miss something: a single unusual entry turned into years of litigation and a story that went around the world.
What to do if you are overpaid
Unexpected money in your account can feel like luck, but in most countries it is not yours to keep, even when keeping it is not a crime. The rules differ from place to place, so this is general information rather than legal advice. A few steps protect you:
- Tell your employer or bank promptly and in writing, so there is a record that you acted in good faith.
- Do not spend or move the money while the matter is sorted out.
- Ask for a clear written explanation of how much is owed and how it will be recovered.
- If repayment would cause hardship, ask about a repayment plan, and consider talking to a lawyer or a free legal advice service.
The Chilean worker was cleared of any crime, but his story became shorthand for a dramatic disappearance with a fortune. The fuller picture is less cinematic: a clerical error, an employer's complaint, three years of hearings, and courts that decided the matter belonged in civil law rather than criminal court.
Sources: The Clinic, 22 September 2025: Cial files appeal after acquittal; 24 Horas, 15 September 2025: court acquits worker; Panamericana: worker paid 330 salaries acquitted after three years; CNN Chile: Court of Appeals upholds acquittal; Diario Financiero, June 2022 (original report); LADbible, 30 June 2022.
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