Man Charged 23 Quadrillion Bucks For Pack Of Cigarettes

Man Charged 23 Quadrillion Bucks For Pack Of Cigarettes

www.huffingtonpost.com

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A New Hampshire man says he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and was charged over 23 quadrillion dollars.

Josh Muszynski (Moo-SIN'-ski) checked his account online a few hours later and saw the 17-digit number – a stunning $23,148,855,308,184,500 (twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars).

Muszynski says he spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to sort out the string of numbers

(visit the link for the full news article)


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I laughed when i saw this, and thought some people on here might appreciate it. I bet he wasn't too concerned with the 15$ overdraft fee! that's a lot of zeros. Its too bad the bank could disclose anything about the incident, id love to know how he ended up with that price tag.

I wonder if that's where prices for a pack of smokes will start going in North America?

Boy, would i be making a stir if i was this guy. I wonder if the store clerk ran for the hills?

www.huffingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

just goes to show you... it's cheaper to quit!

[edit on 15-7-2009 by ModernAcademia]

The clerk swiped the card again for the amount. I have done this myself, but luckily I caught it! An account number makes quite a hefty dollar figure!

How on earth would the machine have approved this amount? He should try this at a casino, cash out and go home!!!!

He needs to shop at a different store.

One more reason to give up smoking.

Obama's new tax policy... Tax one guy enough to pay for all his health care spending.

Was the clerk getting 1% bonus for all his sales he makes ? lol

Would be amazing if it was the other around though, finding a quadrillion $'s in your bank account

23 quadrillion!?!?! Those better be the best damn cigarettes in the UNIVERSE!!!! Lol.

This seems to be related to this ongoing thread:

Linky Madoodle

Originally posted by warrenb
THREE separate cases of problems with VISA have occurred in the last couple days...


Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore

Visa recorded a $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 purchase on Consumerist reader Dale's kid's prepaid Visa Buxx card: "My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday she charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store.

consumerist.com...

NH man charged 23 quadrillion dollars for smokes

A New Hampshire man says he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and was charged over 23 quadrillion dollars.

www.sfgate.com...

Credit card company says Trophy Club man ate $23 quadrillion meal

A technical glitch via Visa's billing department led Jon Seale of Trophy Club to receive a $23,148,855,308,184,500 credit card statement (that's $23 quadrillion, folks). The charge in question came from Wolfgang Puck's new restaurant, Five Sixty, which is expensive, but not that expensive.

www.pegasusnews.com...


Case #1. $23,148,855,308,184,500
Case #2. $23,148,855,308,184,500
Case #3. $23,148,855,308,184,500

My thoughts on the matter...

These charges appear temporarily in VISA's books as money owed to them until the issue gets cleared up. Are these things not errors or bugs but something more sinister?

Can that temporary value be used to influence markets and buy stuff? It sure can so keep your eyes open to other similar oddities.

UPDATE

Visa said a technical glitch caused the trouble, but it did not say exactly how many accounts were affected.

"A temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts," Visa spokeswoman Elvira Swanson said in a written statement. "The technical glitch has been corrected, and all erroneous postings have been removed."

A Visa representative said affected customers will have any overdraft fees removed.

today.msnbc.msn.com...

Technical glitch...haha
Since they billed people the wrong amounts, I wonder if the reverse is also possible. Have they mistakenly credited anyone with huge sums of money?

About 14-15 years ago my mother got a surprise when she got her bank statement. She had an extra 6 million in the account. She immediately went to the bank and reported their error. I would have waited 6 months, supposedly the legal time a bank has to fix the error before you can keep it; then transferred it to another account and moved.

[edit on 15-7-2009 by warrenb]

you think that's crazy how about $23 quadrillion for a meal or a trip to the pharmacy? haha
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by getreadyalready
The clerk swiped the card again for the amount. I have done this myself, but luckily I caught it! An account number makes quite a hefty dollar figure!

How on earth would the machine have approved this amount? He should try this at a casino, cash out and go home!!!!

Wickid, We now have his account number........

That's the first thing I thought when I read the article...that somewhere between the Merchant Account at the Processing side and the Bank the string that was transmitted parsed the wrong sequence into the Amount field. The only part of the string that is transmitted that could be that long is the Account Number which was parsed into the Amount field by mistake. That's an Intern Level programming mistake.

And yes, this has happened the other way around with insane amounts being Debited to someones Account. However, when the bank makes an error in your favor it is HIGHLY against the law to take that money. You read all the time about someone having hundreds of millions deposited in their account and going to town only to face a long string of Felony charges when some Audit Clerk at the Bank finds the error and reports it.

reply to post by KSPigpen

Interesting how the glitches were all for the same exact amount.

I don't think all those people have the same account number and credit cards are 16 digit numbers, not 17, right?

Now we know the true reason for the global financial 911...... Dodgy cash transactions..... Oh wait we knew that anyway

Didn't you hear? that particular pack of cigarettes granted him immortality, infinite knowledge, and 18 superpowers!!! Dont worry, he will make that money back in no time

:edit: duplicate post (my bad)

[edit on 15-7-2009 by BrainPower]

Well someone had to be credited for the national debt and it was this unlucky fellow lol.
I imagine that with that kind of money for a single day you could make billions of $ easily on the markets. Maybe its some new Obama deal where instead of getting billion $ bailouts from the tax payers you can directly borrow quadrillions from them. Haha nice one.

I think I can deduce what happened here. It's scary that it happened, but it does happen more often than not.

The three published cases show:

Case #1. $23,148,855,308,184,500
Case #2. $23,148,855,308,184,500
Case #3. $23,148,855,308,184,500

What that means is there was a "hard coded" figure in the processing software. It was probably put there during a test phase so that the developer could see the effects of very large transactions on a system. I call this "overtesting", you know just testing it to the extreme to see where it will break.

I don't see a pattern in the number itself, so I imagine the number was probably the total amount of cash sent through VISA processing last year world wide or something crazy like that. (and before I get flamed on that, remember, the amount of traffic is always a lot higher than the amount of revenue. Money gets moved a lot but gets netted out in the end).

Originally posted by rogerstigers
I call this "overtesting", you know just testing it to the extreme to see where it will break.

I think you would be safe to call it overtesting, even at his peak Bill Gates was worth what, $80 billion? So a charge this large would give even him an overdraft. I'm not sure they needed to test numbers that big if it was testing, LOL. Maybe it was just a glitch as they said.

Originally posted by townio
Well someone had to be credited for the national debt and it was this unlucky fellow lol.

National debt!? This unlucky guy looks like he had been credited for the GLOBAL debt!
Imagine how long it would take for any country to pay off that kind of debt,if it ever reaches that high,or in this case this one guy.

reply to post by tormentor


I just found out from work that the N. Texas guy who got dinged for the tip at the Wulfgang Punk restaurant was the husband of one of my coworkers! lol talk about a small world.