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Lydia Alcock’s bank statement
People, always check your bank statements. Eighteen-year-old Lydia Alcock was checking her Visa statement online when she saw that her off-peak Metro-North ticket from Grand Central to Goldens Bridge cost $23,148,855,308,184,500. Yesterday, the NY Times' Peter Abblebome wrote about the college student's amazement:
Ms. Alcock looked. She looked again. She gasped. She laughed. She shouted to her father: “Dad, you need to come here. Right now.” And then after realizing, to her chagrin, that she owed the staggering sum, not that she was the recipient of a tidy little windfall, she typed into Google: “How to say really big numbers,” and cut and pasted $23,148,855,308,184,500. It read: “twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars.”It turned out that between 12,000 and 13,000 Visa customers were accidentally billed $23 quadrillion for various purchases. Visa fixed the error—and Wachovia waived the $20 fee for overdrawing on her account.
WCBS 880's Sean Adams, who worked in a reference to the MTA needing money, spoke to Alcock, who said, "I think the moral is you can't trust online banking" as much as you want to.
Also, check the menu—remember the $55 mac-and-cheese at the Waverly Inn?
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more importantly, where did this person find a jimmy johns?
Wow! You are so right...I haven't seen one of those in ages!
The teen is a student at Johns Hopkins, so maybe around there?
Looks that way. The Times article says she discovered the error after returning from a trip to Baltimore; the two Metro-North transactions would be the round trip there and back, so Jimmy Johns, the University Shop, and Spinelli's Pizza were all in Baltimore.
Looks that way. The Times article says she discovered the error after returning from a trip to Baltimore; the two Metro-North transactions would be the round trip there and back,
Um, no they wouldn't; Metro North trains do not go to Baltimore or any other city that's south of Manhattan . . .
Oops. For some reason I was thinking AmTrak while typing Metro-North. Suppose because I was thinking about how to get to Baltimore.
OK, this doesn't explain the MN trip either, but I have found one city so far with both a Spinelli's and a Jimmy John's: Louisville.
Check whose statements? You want us to check Gothamist's?
how do you spend 1.47 at Jimmy Johns?! Did she go in to just buy a soda? Did she get a soda delivered?
It was another Visa Card error: she had actually spent $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at Jimmy Johns.
girls, especially college girls like to use the plastic on everything. daddy can keep an eye on her that way.
Cool, maybe the MTA can finally finish the 2nd Ave subway line now but I have a feeling it will still run over-budget.
Doesn't the MTA regularly find this sum of money in their yearly audit?
Just Perfect. Right up there with the $81 Billion gasoline bill...
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing - online banking is one of the heroes of this story in that it enabled this girl to catch the error sooner than she might otherwise have.
I concur. It seems like Ms. Alcock did not learn the correct lesson from this incident.
You'd think the bank will call the owner of the account of some kind of large sum showed up like that.
Why? They just bundle that debt, wrap it with a credit default swap, and shove it through the global financial markets along with all the other sludge and feces.
I was a CS major in college, so this is an interesting story to me. If you write the number as one long string of digits, including two zeros for cents, you get 2314885530818450000. If you convert that into hexadecimal (base 16), the format computers use, you get 2020202020201250. Coincidentally, "20" in hexadecimal is the code computers use to represent what you get when you hit the spacebar. If you drop off all the 20s, what you're left with is 1250, which is 4688, or $46.88, which is much more reasonable. It looks like whoever entered the price into their computer hit the spacebar a bunch of times before the charge. The computer misinterpreted the space bar as an actual number.
Interesting idea, but $46.88 isn't really a reasonable amount for a Metro-North TVM purchase, since her prior one a few days before was only $13.25. Actually, there's not a purchase you can make on one of those machines that would result in an 88-cent fractional amount.
Wait, so if I need to borrow 23 quadrillion dollars from Wachovia, they are only going to charge me $20? Good to know.
really Gothamist? This is old news. It happened to a lot, if not most, of the people with the pre-paid Visa cards - typically kids.
July 14 - http://consumerist.com/5314246/unruly-teen-charges-23-quadrillion-at-drugstore
July 15 - http://www.nypost.com/seven/07152009/news/nationalnews/us_man_charged_23_quadrillion_dollars_fo_179411.htm