A guy spends $1.94 on his prepaid VISA card and receives a bill for $23,148,855,308,184,500. VISA also charged him a $15 overdraft fee.
This tale of IT failure is so extreme as to be a joke, making it the perfect story for a mid-summer Friday.
A guy spends $1.94 on his prepaid VISA card and then receives a bill for $23,148,855,308,184,500. Making things worse, VISA also charged the poor fellow an additional $15 fee.
In a comment titled "Visa deserves glitchslapping?," an anonymous coward pointed out that the incorrect charges, which applied to purchases for cigarettes, gasoline, and sundry other items and services, came to exactly 2,314,885,530,818,450,000 cents, which when converted to binhex comes to 2020202020201250.
"It looks to me like somebody blank-filled a field, plopped the actual charged amount into the end (hex 1250, decimal 4688, likely amount $46.88), and then interpreted the entire field as a hex number," AC wrote. "If so, this is the kind of bug that would have been caught in even the most cursory testing, in which case the 'technical glitch' Visa talks about was not really in the software--bugs happen--but in their own shoddy procedures that allowed untested software to go live."
This still doesn't explain how 13,000 people could all be charged precisely the same amount for purchases whose real-world value were vastly different. Reg reader Stuart McConnachie, who also forwarded the binhex theory, guesses the identical overcharge is the result of a rounding error. When converting to a real number, only the first 15 digits were included, he said. The remainder were converted to zero.
Moral of the story. Check your bill carefully, I suppose. What do you think?