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An Australian bartender who spent $1.6 million in just four months after exploiting a banking error has told his story in a new YouTube series titled The Glitch.

Dan Saunders, from Wangaratta in Victoria, discovered the technical flaw during a night out at a local pub in early 2011. The fault involved National Australia Bank’s ATM system.

Saunders was 29 when he stumbled upon the loophole. He had attempted to transfer $200 from his credit card into a bank account containing only $3.

Although the ATM reported that the transaction had failed, the money appeared in his account. Saunders soon realised that, during the hour each night when the system went ‘offline’ for network maintenance, he could move funds from his credit card into his savings account.

After making the discovery, he went back to drinking with his friends at the pub. Later that night, he returned to the ATM and tried the same method again.

For the next four months, Saunders lived extravagantly, spending $1.6 million on private jets, luxury hotels, high-end restaurants, limousines, champagne and gambling.

Eventually, guilt and anxiety became overwhelming. He confessed on A Current Affair, prompting police attention and leading to 111 charges connected to fraud and theft.

In The Glitch, the episodes of which are available to Daily Mail readers before public release, Saunders explains how he first uncovered the banking error.

He said he initially attempted to transfer money between his savings account and credit card. Despite the machine marking the transaction as ‘cancelled’, he was still able to withdraw cash.

Saunders then rejoined his friends at the pub, continued drinking and later decided to test the ATM once more before heading home.

‘We leave [the pub], then it starts to rain… I’ve got to walk home… so I’m like, “I’ll just stop in at the ATM”,’ he said.

‘I certainly didn’t need more money at that point, like nothing was open. I couldn’t have gone anywhere. So, out of pure curiosity and probably a bit of beer, I’ve just gone back in to just see what happens here.’

Saunders went on to explain how he racked up thousands of dollars across both of his cards.

‘I had about $19,140 or something like that in my hand, and the rain stopped. I was like, “Perfect, great”,’ he said.

‘I put the money in my wallet and, yeah, just went home, went to bed, and I remember distinctly waking up in the morning and I was like, “Oh, hell of a dream. That was a weird dream to have”.

‘Then I knelt, looked to the side, and on the right-hand side of me was this bedside table and a wallet full of cash. And I was like, “Wow, that really did happen”.’

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‘The Glitch’, which attracted more than 2.6 million podcast downloads, has now been adapted into a six-part YouTube series for True Crime Central. 

The first instalment launches on October 3 and is available to Daily Mail readers from Friday.

It features exclusive interviews and first-hand accounts from Saunders, his friends and investigative journalist Adam Shand, who broke the story in 2014.

In the first instalment, alongside his account of how he ended up with nearly $20,000 in one night, Saunders said he had been a trustworthy member of society. 

‘I’d done probably two things wrong that I was never caught for,’ he told podcast host Jay Walkerden, referencing his decision at five years old to walk out of a shop with a bedspread set that his mother liked. 

The other anecdote surrounded his time working at a casino as a young adult and sneaking into a swimming pool. 

Saunders has previously reflected on his former life, including one interview during which he said he felt like a ‘white Kanye West’ while spending the money.

‘I’ve never felt more alive than when I was charging on my credit card,’ he said in 2014.

‘With the NAB card, I could be anyone I wanted to be, go anywhere I wanted to go, do anything as long as I had the card in my back pocket. I felt like a king.’

Police issued a warrant for his arrest after he appeared on national television, and he was later sentenced to 12 months’ jail. 

He was also ordered to repay $200,000 of what he had taken and carry out 18 months of community service.

‘It felt so good – my brain is a bit different to everyone else’s,’ he said of the punishment.

The first episode of ‘The Glitch’ will launch on True Crime Central on October 3, with subsequent episodes published weekly.

For most people, the habits of the Covid years – masks tucked into coat pockets and plastic testing kits arranged beside the bathroom sink – finally feel like a distant memory.

But in recent weeks, one unwelcome sentence has started resurfacing in offices, schools and family WhatsApp groups: ‘I think I’ve got Covid.’

After several years in which the virus that once brought Britain to a standstill had slipped from everyday conversation, Covid now appears to be making a comeback.

The latest figures from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) show that Covid-related hospital admissions have climbed by almost 50 per cent in a week. At the same time, the share of hospital Covid tests returning a positive result has increased from 5.9 per cent to 7 per cent.

The rise is even steeper in London, where hospital admissions have jumped by almost 80 per cent in seven days. Among people aged over 85 – the group most at risk – admissions have risen from 7.08 to 12.43 per 100,000. However, far fewer people are testing for Covid than during the pandemic, meaning the true number of infections remains unclear.

That has left many people asking a question they had hoped never to revisit: how concerned should we be?

The reassuring answer is that the level of concern should be nowhere near what it was more than five years ago.

Covid is experiencing an autumn resurgence, but the figures remain a long way below the darkest periods of the pandemic, when hospitals were overwhelmed and hundreds of people in Britain died each day. For most patients, symptoms are also considerably easier to manage.

That may change if a combination of winter illnesses, including Covid, begins circulating at the same time. Experts remain concerned that such a wave could place hospitals under severe pressure, as happened in 2024.

‘Covid is increasing, but from a low level, which is not unexpected at this time of year,’ says Dr Matthew Siggins, a lecturer in immunity and infection biology at the University of Surrey. ‘The most recent UKHSA data for England show weekly hospital admissions have risen from 0.81 to 1.20 per 100,000, which is still classified as a baseline level.’

The variant currently accounting for most infections is XFG, widely known as ‘Stratus’ and sometimes nicknamed ‘American Covid’.

First identified in January 2025, XFG has spread across Britain and the United States, producing many of the familiar symptoms associated with Covid. Alongside coughs and fever, however, some doctors say they are seeing gastrointestinal problems in patients infected with Stratus.

Dr Renée Hoenderkamp, a GP in London, says her surgery has seen a noticeable shift in the number of patients reporting sore throats, headaches, runny noses and fatigue.

‘In the past ten days to three weeks in general practice my lists have definitely changed to people with these symptoms,’ she says. ‘It’s definitely about.’

Yet these symptoms can easily be confused with those caused by other seasonal viruses. ‘It’s very flu-like, actually, which is probably the fairest way to describe it,’ Dr Hoenderkamp says of the latest strain.

She believes she recently had Covid after briefly losing her sense of taste, although her other symptoms were limited to a runny nose and fatigue. ‘That’s the reality for most people,’ she says. But the illness can still be severe for some. One mother-of-two in her fifties from south-west London, who describes herself as rarely ill, told the Daily Mail she was ‘floored’ for five days after becoming sick last Friday. She did not take a Covid test, but her symptoms appeared during the current wave of respiratory infections.

‘I’m never ill – I literally can’t remember the last time I took a sick day,’ she says. ‘But I was absolutely exhausted, with a temperature, cough and really painful flu-like aches in my legs and joints.

‘There were times in the morning when I’d think: “I’m fine, get your act together.” But by lunchtime I’d have to go back to bed. I slept through a lot of it.’

Her teenage daughter, meanwhile, who fell ill a few days previously, was still ill after ten days.

‘She had a really bad headache, sore throat and cough, a raging temperature and was completely exhausted,’ her mother says. ‘She developed an eye infection and a chest infection and eventually we took her to the doctor because we thought: “This is crazy.”

‘The doctor said she was the third person he’d seen that day with something similar.’

Professor Emma Wall, a clinical professor of infectious diseases at Queen Mary University of London, says: ‘Some people will be floored by an infection while others remain asymptomatic, and we don’t yet completely understand the biology behind that.

‘Some people have very effective T-cells [a type of white blood cell] that clear an infection before you know you’ve got it, while in others they can stimulate an inflammatory response to the infection that affects the whole body, which is probably part of what makes some people feel so ill.’

Perhaps the most important context comes from the death toll. The latest readily available UKHSA figures show seven registered deaths involving Covid in England in the week ending August 28, compared with six the previous week.

Earlier this year the weekly figure was considerably higher – there were 61 deaths in a week in mid-January.

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So while infections and hospitalisations are unmistakably heading upwards, there is nothing remotely resembling the mortality crisis of the original pandemic.

At its peak in January 2021, 25,889 Covid deaths were registered in England – although, in nearly 8 per cent of those cases, Covid was listed as a ‘contributory factor’ rather than the underlying cause. For the overwhelming majority of otherwise healthy people, therefore, Dr Hoenderkamp believes there is little reason to be alarmed.

Her advice is essentially the same common sense that applies to other respiratory illnesses: if you are running a high temperature or feel particularly unwell, stay at home. ‘You would do the same with flu,’ she adds.

Unlike the heavy-handed instructions of 2020, however, she believes those with coughs or sniffles, meanwhile, should go about their business as usual – and not be judged for it.

‘The fact is we can’t tell everyone with a cold to stay at home because the world would come to a halt,’ she says. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that coughs or upper respiratory tract infections can last for up to eight weeks. You can’t tell people to isolate for that long. Ultimately, we have to accept that illness is around us and we can’t live in a bubble.’

Even so, not everyone appears quite ready to consign the heightened precautions of the pandemic years to history.

For some stalwarts, mask-wearing is still a feature of every-day life. Last week, the Daily Mail reported the story of the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which found itself at the centre of a ferocious online backlash after dropping – for one night only – its requirement that every customer wear a mask.

The owners were branded ‘eugenicists’ intent on murdering the sick – a sentiment that gets short shrift from Dr Hoenderkamp, who brands mask-wearing ‘a nonsense’.

‘I think the evidence is really clear now that a surgical mask cannot protect you from Covid,’ she says. ‘Most people wearing them are virtue-signalling.’

More significant is the role of immunity. ‘Most people still have substantial immunity from previous infection and vaccination’, says Dr Siggins. ‘That immunity does not always prevent infection, and it can fade over time, so reinfections still occur. However, protection against serious illness is generally much stronger.’

He adds: ‘While the virus continues to change, there is no evidence that the variants circulating in the UK are causing more severe disease.’

Most people have developed remarkably broad immunity to Covid, says Professor Wall, who, in addition to her role at Queen Mary University, leads a study at the Francis Crick Institute which has been tracking the immune responses of 800 predominantly healthy London adults since 2020.

That research is largely reassuring, as it shows that after repeated exposure through vaccination and infection, immunity is strong, even to new variants.

‘Every time a new variant turns up, most of the population we study already has some pre-existing immunity to it,’ she says.

This helps explain the apparent paradox of Covid continuing to circulate – and periodically producing noticeable spikes in infections – without approaching anything like the level of serious illness from the pandemic. New sub-variants typically acquire a slight biological advantage, which allows them to spread more effectively. ‘The virus is shifting a bit, but it’s not able to properly reassort itself to evade our immunity completely,’ Professor Wall explains.

In effect, it can still evade enough of our defences to replicate in the nose and be passed to somebody else, sometimes without causing symptoms.

But deeper protection in the immune system means for most healthy people it is far less able to invade the body and cause serious illness.

There is, however, an important caveat: Evidence increasingly suggests that repeated infections may increase the risk of Long Covid.

Professor Wall, who also works in a Long Covid clinic at University College London Hospitals NHS Trust, says new patients are still being referred, including people developing the condition after their fourth or fifth infection.

‘For most people, infection going round is harmless, and may actually boost immunity,’ she says. ‘But there are clinically vulnerable adults who are at risk, and there are also people who will either get Long Covid or experience a relapse.’

Researchers are continually monitoring emerging variants for mutations that could allow the virus to evade existing immunity more substantially. ‘We haven’t identified any mutations we think are really risky,’ Professor Wall says reassuringly.

That does not, however, mean scientists can guarantee there is nothing nastier waiting around the corner. Britain has already experienced the pressure created when several viruses surge.

In December 2024, hospitals in England were hit by what the then NHS England medical director Professor Sir Stephen Powis described as a ‘tidal wave’ of flu and other winter viruses. The ‘quademic’ of flu, Covid, RSV (a common respiratory virus) and norovirus led to an average of nearly 1,900 beds being taken by flu patients in the first week of December that year – 70 per cent up on the week before and more than three times higher than the same period in 2023.

Scientists remain vigilant. ‘We expect the traditional winter spikes of flu and rhinoviruses, while Covid looks as though it can come at any time,’ Professor Wall says. ‘So we remain under surveillance. That helps us work out who needs to be vaccinated and with which vaccine.’

Overall, then, the message is: don’t worry… too much.

‘We need to accept that coronaviruses have always been with us and will continue to be,’ Dr Hoenderkamp says. ‘There have always been cold viruses, and Covid is now one of them.’

The Albanese government is preparing to tighten Australia’s temporary migration system, targeting people accused of moving repeatedly between visas to remain in the country indefinitely.

Starting Friday, new limits will apply to many international students and recent graduates seeking to bring partners or children to Australia.

PhD candidates, recipients of Australian or overseas government scholarships, and applicants from ASEAN and Pacific countries will be excluded from some of the restrictions. However, eligible dependants must be included when the primary student visa is approved.

International students who want to change their university course will also face a new visa application fee of about $1,200.

Students have previously been allowed to transfer courses after six months of study. Under the interim reforms, that waiting period will rise to 12 months, before a separate visa requirement is expected to begin in July next year.

People already in Australia on temporary visas—including working holidaymaker and temporary employer-sponsored visas—will generally be prevented from applying for a student visa from within the country.

The changes follow a broader package of migration reforms outlined by Immigration Minister Tony Burke during a National Press Club address in September.

Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill said the measures were intended to curb “visa hopping”, according to  the Australian Financial Review.

“One of the biggest problems has been the growth in permanently temporary migrants,” Hill said in a keynote speech to the Migration Institute of Australia in Sydney on Friday.

He described people who move from one visa to another for years, sometimes spending most of their adult lives in Australia and raising children who are now Australian citizens, despite never qualifying for skilled migration or remaining on bridging visas while waiting for a permanent outcome.

“When Australians travel to another country, they do not assume they have a God-given right to move between visas for years or decades, or to manipulate that nation’s appeals and court systems—and visitors to Australia should not expect to do so either,” he said.

Mr Hill also cautioned migration agents and lawyers against weakening the system by submitting visa applications or claims that lack a credible basis.

He criticised online advertisements that allegedly instruct people to falsely claim they are bisexual or pretend to face persecution in order to support a protection visa application.

“That is not legal representation. It is the misuse of the migration system for profit,” he said.

“Ultimately, I do not have confidence in the policy regime governing how lawyers engage with the migration system.”

Nearly 688,000 international students were enrolled in Australia in the year to June. China was the largest source of students, followed by India, Nepal, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Despite the significant figures, the rate of student visa rejections has soared to 35 per cent, up from 23 per cent in the same period last year, according to data from the Department of Home Affairs.

The overhaul of student visa rules comes as the Albanese government attempts to bring net overseas migration down from almost 300,000 a year to a target of 225,000 by 2028. 

Under the sweeping reforms, parameters around the skilled migration program will also be tightened. 

Priority will be given to those working in healthcare, construction, teaching, resources, agriculture, aquaculture and fishing.