A customer of Citigroup was given a big surprise after it had mistakenly transferred $81 trillion dollars into the customer’s account.
According to CBS News, the customer was only supposed to receive a transfer of $280 but instead received the huge transfer into their account before it was abruptly reversed only hours later, which was reported by the Financial Times on Friday.
The outlet further reported two people familiar with the matter had said that the incident had taken place in April of last year and had been missed by a payment’s employee and a second worker before it was cleared to process the next day.
The error was ultimately discovered by a third employee about an hour and a half after the payment had been processed and swiftly revered the transaction a few hours later.
Furthermore, the incident had been reported to the Federal reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and no funds had actually left the bank, the report noted.
“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,” a Citigroup spokesperson stated in an email. “Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.”
Citi added that neither the customer nor the bank was affected by the blunder, but CBS News reported that this isn’t the first time large sums of money had been wrongfully transferred into the wrong account. In 2024, the bank had ten near misses of almost $1 billion, a slight decrease over the usual 13 or more incidences per year.
In 2021, a federal Southern District Court of New York found that Citibank would be unable to claw back $900 million that it had accidentally transferred to lenders, after it was supposed to wire $7.8 million to in interest payments to Revlon Inc. and instead transferred the funds to Revlon. After attempting to reclaim the funds, a judge concluded that Citibank was not entitled to get its money back.
