Man Buys Cigarettes, Owes 23 Quadrillion Dollars
Jul 16th 09
If you had this much money, you could buy the moon. Or, you could get a refund if you tried to buy the moon from Carl Everett. You know what he would tell you.
But this money was charged to a New Hampshire man’s debit account when he bought a pack of cigarettes from a gas station. When he had looked at his account later on, it showed that he had owed $23,148,855,308,184,500.
Let me digress by stating the hilarity of this episode peaks since the debiting bank Bank of America still slapped the poor son of a gun with an overdraft fee of $15. In trying to squeeze out every single cent from the working class, they nearly loaned out the equivalent of all the money in the world 1000 fold!
Anyway, Josh Muszynski showed the statement to the gas attendant and she was shocked:
“The gentleman it happened to came in with his laptop and showed me that number, and I couldn’t believe it,”
He had promptly called up his bank and the Visa company, and the outrageous amount was corrected the next day.
When WMUR, the news team that covered this incident, tried to question the bank about the error, the bank told them that reps from Visa could only answer questions. And when WMUR contacted Visa, Visa stated only Bank of America reps can answer questions. So the game of hot potato was afoot!
Visa released a statement about the error, and apologized to the people it has affected.
People is pluralized, for one reason they mentioned that the glitch may affect many people with pre-paid debit cards in the US. For another, I found two other incidences of the quadrillion dollars shebangle.
Incident 2
Incident 3
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