A UK couple woke up to find themselves £11m richer thanks to what they believed were “aggressive high risk” investments.
However they were soon left “heartbroken” after contacting their financial advisors who revealed that the massive “jackpot” was simply a technical error.
On Wednesday morning self-employed builder Richard Warnock and his wife Jacqueline woke up to a shocking £10.8m across their two accounts, £8.3m for Richard and £2.5m for Jacqueline.
Mr Warnock told the Daily Record: “For a couple of hours there, I thought this might be real and we’d hit the jackpot! It was like winning the EuroMillions! My heart was racing when I saw the cash. We had already started thinking about how we would spend it.”
“At first I did think it must have been a mistake – but my wife Jacqui said her portfolio was up too. We started thinking one of our company investments had gone through the roof overnight as is the nature with the stock market and this could be genuine.”
The couple each have an account with global investment company Abrdn which they have used for a self-invested private pension and a Stocks and Shares ISA for the last five years.
Still suspicious of the sudden “jackpot” Mr Warnock contacted his independent financial adviser Acova Wealth Management which is when he discovered that his recently acquired millionaire status was the result of an IT error which involved a decimal point being incorrectly placed on a stock.
Mr Warnock said that his “heart sank” when he found out that the millions were a mistake as he had “really gotten his hopes up” thinking that one of his “high risk… aggressive investments” had finally supplied a big return.
Abrdn has not contacted the couple and they had to learn about the error through their wealth managers at Acova, the couples account value has now gone back to a value of around £500,000.
An Abrdn spokesperson said: “There was an error in the intra-day fund price data feed we received from a third party. This related to a small number of funds from one external fund manager. The result was that an error appeared on our system for a short period of time on Wednesday 20 March.
“The issue lay with the company who supplies share price data to platforms across the market, including Abrdn. Our BAU processes identified the error which was then raised with the third-party provider who fixed the issue.
“Values are now showing correctly on our systems. There has been no impact on any customer holdings. We regret any problems this may have caused for the Financial Advisers who use our platform and their clients. Abrdn is an adviser facing platform and therefore it is right and proper that our interactions on issues such as this would be with the adviser not the customer.”
