A scaf­fold­er has been charged with lar­ce­ny of close to a mil­lion dol­lars af­ter a bank ac­ci­den­tal­ly cred­it­ed his ac­count with over $32 mil­lion.

Joel Julien has been charged with lar­ce­ny of $956,857.70 by Cpl (Ag) Cum­mings of the Fraud Squad and is ex­pect­ed to ap­pear be­fore a Port-of-Spain mag­is­trate to­day.

Po­lice say that dur­ing a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion ex­er­cise con­duct­ed by a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, it was dis­cov­ered that a sys­tem er­ror re­sult­ed in $32,347,308.55 be­ing mis­tak­en­ly cred­it­ed to a per­son­al ac­count held at the in­sti­tu­tion.

It is al­leged that dur­ing the pe­ri­od No­vem­ber 18, 2022 and De­cem­ber 1, 2022, the own­er of the per­son­al ac­count with­drew sums to­talling $825,000 in cash from var­i­ous au­to­mat­ed bank­ing ma­chines and con­duct­ed point-of-sale pur­chas­es to­talling $131,357.70, to­geth­er to­talling $956,857.70.

Ef­forts by the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion to get a full re­fund of the mon­ey proved fu­tile and a re­port was made to the Fraud Squad.

Fol­low­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the mat­ter, Fraud Squad of­fi­cers un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Snr. Supt. Ar­let Groome con­duct­ed an ex­er­cise which re­sult­ed in the ar­rest of a male sus­pect.

A to­tal of $600,501 in cash was al­leged­ly re­cov­ered at his home.

Julien was charged with the of­fence on Thurs­day.