On February 28, the Financial Times (FT) reported that Citigroup in the United States nearly transferred $81 trillion due to a clerical error in April last year. The intended transfer amount was only $280. Although the transaction was canceled within a few hours, it took 90 minutes to detect the mistake.
According to the FT, the error occurred while attempting to send $280 to Brazil. The system flagged the transaction as a potential sanctions violation, triggering a manual review. When an employee tried to process the transfer manually, they failed to delete 15 extra zeros already entered into the system.
Both the employee who entered the amount and the one responsible for checking the transaction missed the mistake, and it wasn't until a third employee noticed an issue with the account balance that the error was caught. Since the transaction was canceled in time, no money was actually transferred to the customer.
The FT quoted former regulators saying that incidents involving attempted transfers exceeding $1 billion are rare in the U.S. banking industry.
Viewer Comments:
Good thing the system flagged the error.
Isn’t that more than an entire national budget? It could crash the economy.
I wouldn’t mind if they accidentally sent just 1% to my account.
Source:Citi mistakenly credits $81 trillion to customer account – CBS News
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