A man who was charged more than 23 quadrillion dollars on his credit card for a packet of cigarettes has told of his relief at not having to foot the bill.
Josh Muszynski checked his account a few hours after making the purchase at a Mobil petrol station and saw the incredible 17-digit number.
He had been charged a total of $23,148,855,308,184,500 (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).
"I thought somebody bought Europe with my credit card," he told the WMUR-TV station in his home town of Manchester, New Hampshire.
"It was very concerning - it was a lot of money in the negative."
Mr Muszynski said he panicked and drove back to the petrol station, where the assistant was unable to help him get to the bottom of the extortionate fee - which was greater than the world's combined GDP.
He said he spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to sort out the string of numbers and the overdraft charge.
The bank corrected the error the next day.
Visa has since released a statement saying: "A temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services, caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts.
"The technical glitch, which impacted fewer than 13,000 Visa prepaid transactions, has been corrected and erroneous postings have been removed.
"Importantly, this incident had no financial impact on Visa prepaid cardholders.
"Visa regrets any inconvenience to our customers and has taken immediate steps to ensure this error doesn't occur again."
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