This was some fun news from last week. Imagine going to the store for some cigarettes (bad you but I respect your rights) and swiping the trusty Visa and heading back home. As you leave the store credit/debit card magic is happening (how credit cards make money). Little did you know that something has gone terribly wrong with the magic. Some time later you check your statement online and find a slight discrepancy. Instead of a few bucks it’s a few quadrillion bucks. Specifically, $23,148,855,308,184,500.
The human mind is weak and therefore it’s difficult to really comprehend how much money that is. The Office of Management and Budget (lead by super-nerd Peter Orszag) projects the 2010 budget for the United States to be just about $3.5 trillion (page 114). Let’s line these numbers up together along with a the cost of a typical pack of cigarettes.
$4
$3,500,000,000,000
$23,148,855,308,184,500
So yeah, that’s big. For reference $3.5 trillion divides into that number 6,614 times. That’s 6,614 federal budgets or government expenditures from now until the year 8623.
Useless number games aside, it goes without saying that this was obviously a mistake. This $23 quadrillion bill for cigarettes was charged to a man in New Hampshire, Josh Muszynski. And since he didn’t have that much money in his account at the time his was slapped with a $15 overdraft fee from Bank of America. He should keep more money in reserve to avoid those fees. Thankfully Bank of America in conjunction with Visa figured out the problem.
The great thing is that it didn’t happen just once. Nope. A dude in North Texas got slapped with the exact same $23 quadrillion for buying dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant. Though that’s probably close to the cost of a meal by the most famous chef to never be employed by the Food Network, this was in fact an error as well. This time the debit card holder, Jon Seale, was dinged with an overdraft charge of $20 from Wachovia (what’s left of it).
Both banked waived these fees and said that a glitch in the Visa debit card processing system created the massive bill. Since it happened to two people within a short period of time to people at different banks, the evidence points to Visa for being responsible. In a classic move of stupid PR, they owned up to the mistake with Wachovia but told reporters in the New Hampshire case to direct questions to Bank of America (who in turn told them to direct questions to Visa).
The Weaky goes to Visa for allowing such an error to get through their system. Any company as large as this should catch mistakes like this.
If you’re the geeky type you can learn more about what may have caused the $23 quadrillion whoopsie. The short version is that it was simple a coding error that didn’t get caught. The geeky version includes references to hex code so if you don’t even know what hex is short for don’t bother reading.
So this was a huge Visa fail but thankfully everything was fixed and no long-term harm was done. Now all that’s left is for someone to try and break the record for the biggest single screw up in monetary coding since Michael Bolton’s misplaced decimal.
Photo: eklektikos
 By The Weakonomist |
The Weakonomist is the founder of Weakonomics. Clicking the picture of the puppy will tell you more about him. If you like what you're reading consider subscribing to the blog, following him on Twitter, and checking out the related posts below. Please consider a donation if you really enjoy Weakonomics. Also keep in mind that nothing I say can be construed as financial advice. |
