Citigroup, a US bank, praised the client's account for $81tn if it intended to send $280 before the “fat finger” error was caught.
The mistake was only discovered after two employees missed it, and the Financial Times reported that it fixed it 90 minutes after the third employee was posted. I have no funds left the bank.
The bank has disclosed a “near miss” to the US Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Money.
The 81tn (£64tn) transaction is so large that it is unlikely to pass through the banking system. It would certainly have been down as one of the biggest fat finger mistakes of all time. There, the wrong number is entered into the computer system.
This total would be more than enough to buy the entire US stock market, including all the major tech companies, at a healthy premium. That's what the US stock market was like It's worth 62tn At the end of 2024, according to the current market valuation website.
This amount is enough to buy more than 200 times the assets of Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world. His fortune is valued at $343 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.
The total stock of global wealth was estimated at around 450 tonnes by UBS last year. That's how the UK's wealth was Estimated At 16tn in 2022.
A City spokesman said: “Despite the fact that payments of this size were not actually possible, our detective control quickly identified input errors between two CITI ledger accounts and reversed the entries. Our preventive control would have also halted funds to leave the bank.
“While it had no impact on banks or clients, this episode highlights the ongoing efforts to eliminate manual processes and automate control through transformation.”
This was not the first fat finger mistake for City, which previously faced criticism of its internal system. In 2020, it accidentally sent $900 million to creditors of cosmetics company Revlon. It took a two-year legal battle for the bank to recover a lot of money from several hedge funds, and Saga helped Citigroup CEO Michael Corbatt to step down.
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The bank was fined £61.6 million in the UK last year after attempting to sell $58 million worth of stock in May 2022. However, the fat-designated trader accidentally sold $1.4 billion worth of stock, causing a “flash crash” in the European stock market. The unidentified trader scrolled through past error messages without reading it.
The Financial Times reported that City had made 10 mistakes last year, more than $1 billion, and cited an internal report.
In 2014, traders cancelled orders for shares from 42 Japanese companies worth 67.78 TN Yen (£38 billion).
