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Visa’s $23 Quadrillion Oops

Written by Evan Schuman
July 16th, 2009
On Monday (July 13), about 13,000 Visa prepaid card consumers got a mathematically eye-opening extra charge, in the form of $23 quadrillion (that's twenty-three-thousand trillion dollars, for those who didn't pay attention in math class) additional charges.

A statement from Visa said that a "temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted" and that the glitch "has been corrected and erroneous postings have been removed. "It simply posted the wrong amount into online statements and it was corrected within hours," one Visa official said, adding that the specific amount varied slightly from consumer to consumer, but that they were all "equally large amounts" and were "in some cases identical amounts."

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Posted in E-Commerce, Payment Systems, Premium Content, Security/Fraud, Software
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