A Bank Mistakenly Credited a Customer's Account with... a Trillion Dollars

An American bank called 'Citigroup' made an unbelievable mistake this week when it credited a customer's account with 81 trillion dollars (!) instead of 280 dollars.

What can you do with 81 trillion dollars, you ask? It's better you don't know, as with that amount, you could buy the entire U.S. stock market, which was valued at only 62 billion.

Although a bank spokesperson said they take full responsibility for the error and are conducting a thorough investigation to ensure such incidents don't happen in the future, this isn't the first time this specific bank has made a deposit mistake. In 2021, the same bank mistakenly transferred 900 million dollars to the wrong customers, and in some cases, the bank could not recover the money.

How did such an error occur? Sources within the bank believe it was due to a numerical entry or calculation mistake.

And how did the customer, who chose to remain anonymous, react?

"I thought it was a joke or a banking system error," he told one of the media outlets that interviewed him. "I immediately called the bank, knowing that trying to use the money could lead to legal issues." The incident raises significant questions about the reliability of banking systems when such amounts can be moved due to a technical error. "It highlights how even sophisticated banking systems are not immune to mistakes. Such a case could have caused financial chaos if not corrected in time," said the financial regulator in the U.S. "We will review the case and examine how to prevent similar issues in the future."

According to the 'Financial Times,' two bank employees missed the mistake until a third employee spotted it, and it was corrected before the funds were actually transferred from the bank to the customer's account. A Citigroup spokesperson in an interview with the British 'Guardian': "Our monitoring systems immediately detected the data entry error, and it was not possible to transfer an amount of such magnitude to a customer's account. It may have been a typo, but the money wouldn't have transferred because we have systems in place to stop such errors."