Jon Seale of Trophy Club, Texas, swiped his Visa card to pay for a $12 pizza at a Wolfgang Puck concession in 2009. But when he checked his account the next day, he saw he'd been charged $23,148,855,308,184,500, or nearly 1,800 times the U.S. national debt.
"I laughed, and my kids laughed and laughed," said Seale. "My son suggested we could go to a Yankees game, but I said we could buy the Yankees!"
Visa said in a statement that erroneous charges affected fewer than 13,000 transactions and were caused by a "temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services."
The company assured customers that the problem was fixed and that all falsely issued fees were voided. "This incident had no financial impact on Visa prepaid cardholders," Visa said.
Seale said he didn't rush to anger because, as a software developer, he said he knows "glitches happen."
Still, the snafu made him a lot more mindful of his money.
"I look at [my account] a little more now. If it had been a $100 mistake, I may not have caught it for a while," said Seale. "It made me more aware that it can happen to me."
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