Last year, an employee at Citigroup accidentally initiated a fund transfer to a customer’s account that would have made them the wealthiest person in the history of human existence. The incident, which took place last April, credited a client’s account with a whopping $81 trillion instead of the intended amount (a mere $280), the Financial Times first reported.
Citigroup itself only has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, and the entire U.S. GDP is only worth about $27 trillion. The GDP of the European Union is some $17 trillion. The GDP of China is close to $18 trillion. So, to be clear, the transfer amount would have been more money than most of the economies of the developed world combined. It’s not clear where the bank planned to get the money, and, unfortunately, the customer in question did not get to keep the funds (not that they ever existed).
It’s also unclear whether the person who initiated the transfer got to keep their job. In communications with the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Citi referred to the incident as a “near miss” which, you know, is probably an understatement. No funds ever left the bank, the FT reports.
Actually, “near misses” seem to happen quite a lot and are a formal category of screwup in the banking industry. The said category applies to incidents that do not qualify for regulatory scrutiny, according to FT reporting:
A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but is ultimately able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events. Near misses do not need to be reported to regulators, meaning there is no comprehensive public data on how often these incidents occur across the sector. Several former regulators and bank risk managers said near misses of greater than $1bn were unusual across the US bank industry.
Ultimately, automated systems at the bank were responsible for halting the impossibly massive transfer, while two human employees initially missed the gargantuan outflow of money. A third employee finally caught wind that something was amiss approximately 90 minutes after the transfer was initiated, the FT writes. “Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” the company told the New York Times.
The Times notes that Citi has made some massive fuckups before. Some two years ago, an accounting error for a trade inspired a huge selloff of stocks in Europe that ultimately obliterated some $322 billion in value. For having caused such significant economic chaos, Citigroup was fined $79 million.
Gizmodo reached out to Citigroup for comment and will update this story if it responds.
