You overdraw from your savings account. The bank doesn’t notice. You do it again. Same. And again. Same. What do you do? (A) Stop doing it. (B) Tell the bank about the glitch. (C) Live the life you’ve always dreamed of.
This is the true story of the man who chose C—thanks to more than 1.5 million bucks in “free” cash.
The greatest adventures happen when you least expect them. And on July 15, 2010, Luke “Milky” Moore never thought one of the greatest in recent memory was about to start for him.
Then again, not much ever went down in Goulburn, Australia, his sleepy hometown two hours into the barren brown hills southwest of Sydney. Goulburn’s biggest claim is its roadside attraction, the Big Merino, aka Rambo: a fifty-foot-tall concrete ram with a proportionally huge and hideous scrotum. For the twenty-three thousand locals, the main pastime is “slapping the pokies”—playing the electronic poker machines that fill every pub, kebab shop, and lawn-bowling club—with the hope of winning big enough to leave Rambo in the dust. But Milky, an affable blond twenty-three-year-old nicknamed for his likeness to the child star of the Milkybar candy commercials (think the Australian version of Mikey from the Life cereal ads), never counted on luck to make him rich.
Though he grew up comfortably—his father, Brett, was a bank executive, and his mother, Annette, a child-care supervisor—he’d been employed since thirteen, bagging groceries, mowing lawns, selling insurance. He was a bright student, but he opted to forgo college for work. “I always thought I’d be a millionaire one day,” he says in his thick Australian accent. While his mates were out drunkenly hunting wild boar, Milky was investing in hedge funds, and at nineteen he bought his own home, for himself and his high school sweetheart, Megan.
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a19834127/luke-milky-moore-money-glitch/