An employee pressed some wrong buttons at Citigroup.
The US bank Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send $280
Must have been nice to wake up to! Although apparently the error was rectified within 90 minutes and perhaps wouldn’t have gone through in any case.
If it had though, it’d have made the recipient richer than the UK (total wealth estimated at $16 trillion), able to buy the whole US stock market ($62 tn) and, believe it or not, even richer than Elon Musk (a grotesque $343 billion).
It seems these kind of accidents do happen.
In 2020 it accidentally sent $900m to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon.
Which took 2 years to (partially?) rectify via legal battles.
And in 2022 it accidentally caused a flash crash in the European stock market by inadvertently selling £1 billion worth of shares when it had meant to type in a mere £46 million. The issue there was mixing up the value of shares they wanted to sell with the number of shares. It resulted in a fine of £62 million.
Near misses are of course even more frequent:
…Citi experienced 10 near misses of more than $1bn last year, citing an internal report.