Bank accidentally gives customer $81,000,000,000,000 instead of $280 before spotting critical error

A bank was moments away from giving a customer $81,000,000,000,000 instead of $280 before spotting the mammoth mistake in the nick of time.

It's a scenario the majority of us can only dream of: to wake up one morning with millions of dollars in the bank, ideally with little-to-no effort.

And for almost one extraordinary lucky Citigroup customer, that pipe dream was just the push of a button away from becoming a reality.

The US bank almost credited the unsuspecting customer with $81 trillion, yes, trillion, with the transaction even skipping over the heads of not one but two employees before a third staff member spotted the 'fat finger' mistake, where a wrong number is entered into a computer.

Imagine waking up to $81 trillion (Getty Images)

Had the transaction gone through, the customer would have received a sum large enough to purchase the entire US stock market, including all of the biggest tech pros seen in the likes of Silicon Valley combined which were last valued at $62 trillion by the end of last year, according to the Current Market Valuation site.

You could also buy all the entire NFL, not just individual teams, all of it - plus the NBA and any other sports team you fancy.

With 'just' one trillion, award-winning writer and science podcaster Rowan Hooper poses in his 2021 book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: The 10 Global Problems We Can Actually Fix, you could end global poverty or you could settle on the Moon, build quantum computers, develop A, or increase human lifespan.

It's not the first time the bank has made a huge error (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It would also be enough to buy all of Elon Musk's assets more than 200 times over, all while beating his title as the world's richest man whose net worth is estimated at $359 billion, according to Forbes.

While it would certainly be considered one of the largest 'fat finger' errors probably ever, it's unlikely the bank would have even been able to process the transaction through its systems.

That, and one eagle-eyed employee caught the error some 90 minutes after it was posted, and adjusted the huge sum back to what was meant to be just a $280 transaction, according to the Financial Times.

Citigroup also reported the 'near miss' to the US Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, The Guardian adds.

A Citi spokesperson told the news outlet: “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. Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.

“While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls through our transformation.”

Yet it's not the first time Citigroup has accidentally managed to send eye-watering sums by mistake.

It once sent $900 million to creditors of the cosmetics company, Revlon, in 2020, and spent years fighting to recover it in legal battles.

It was also fined £61.6 million in the UK just last year after a trader accidentally sold shares worth $1.4 billion instead of $58 million, which caused a 'flash crash' across European stock markets.

The Financial Times added the bank had 10 near misses of more than $1 billion last year, according to an internal report.

So, here's to hoping!