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AA: responding to lionel's analysis next below:

i certainly hope we are all pedants

I gather that ET has a contract with BT whereby the latter will honor calls made thru the ET card, billing the latter premium or non-premium rates according to the call a person with a card can draw on the credit thus established for ET, which has made a mistake, having sold the cards at a price which will lose money if the caller calls a premium line.

for that loss the uninformed caller is certainly not liable: it has drawn on ET's account [ its credit, its property] to make the sort of phone communication for which the card to everyone's knowledge has been sold [i don't want to discuss the liability of a caller who catches up with her world-wide acquaintance via premium lines gleefully aware of the bargain she is getting through ET's mistake]

but the cards are sold to enable holders to access ET's account/property for communications and not adventitious gain

the cards make ET's property available on a known condition and taking the property without satisfaction of that condition is tortious

the property is not tangible, and I don't know the terminology used in tort for misappropriation of a credit rather than a chattel: but surely tort law has stepped up to the wicket to cover intangibles with some sort of nominate tort, and can hit FT for the six of the best it so clearly deserves???

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LS: I may be a pedant but in Alex's case the coins are clearly owned, in the technical sense which will support a conviction for theft and which generates a right to immediate possession which will support liability in the tort of conversion. Call me old fashioned (Craig Rotherham, where are you?) but it would seem to me that this ownership concept is not available to ET. Hence unjust enrichment steps up to the plate (wow I really am back in North America). Whether it gets a base hit or strikes out is a more difficult question.