Parents,

You get your child’s credit card bill to find that he is over his limit.  When I say over the limit I don’t mean by $10 or $100 I mean to the tune that the GDP of the entire US would not pay the interest.  Take a look at the notice this guy got on his son’s card:

Dear William,

This e-mail is being sent to notify you that the balance on Daniel XXXX’s card is $-23,148,855,308,184,400.00.

That’s right that is a credit card bill for over 2000 times the national debt.  So how did he run up such a large bill?  It was a pizza and a coke.  A pizza…and…a…coke?  I guess he should have skipped on the extra cheese.

It turns out that this is not the only case.  There were in fact several people that owed $23 Quadrillion.  I am guessing those banks won’t need a bail out.  In the picture you see what should have been a small purchase at CVS turn out to be $23 Quadrillion.  Or a purchase of cigarettes result in a bill that would fund universal health care for generations.  I like that they added the $20 overdraft fee because if anyone is going to pay $23 Quadrillion dollars then what is $20?

Turns out the issue was with a program called VISA BUXX.  It is a prepaid debit card designed to help parents keep their kids spending under control.  Somehow a glitch in the programming occurred and a Hexadecimal conversion to Decimal conversion (or vice versa) went wrong and bam that’s $23 Quadrillion.  The Consumerist gives a more technical explanation for those who are interested.  The error affected over 12,00o people including the interesting story of Lydia Alcock how got a similar bill for riding the Metro.

The story does have a good ending because all 3 people have reported Visa has removed the charge and will remove the overdraft charge once they straighten out the error.  How is that for generous.  The moral of the story is not to take all the charges on your bank statement as 100% accurate.  Keep your receipts and compare them and if you see an error then call and stay at it.  Not all errors are this easy to spot.