The $23 Quadrillion Pack Of Cigarettes

A computer error means that a man goes over his credit card limit by $23 quadrillion for a pack of smokes, and then there's the bank fee.

How much you pay for cigarettes depends on where you live. But there’s nowhere on Earth that charges $23 quadrillion – that’s $23,148,855,308,184,500, to be precise – a pack.

But thanks to a computer error, that’s how much a New Hampshire man paid at a gas station using his pre-paid Visa card. When he checked his balance online later he discovered the amount – plus the $15 bank fee for being overdrawn, just to add insult to injury.

Josh Muszynski told TV station WMUR:

"I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card."

"It is a lot of money in the negative, something I could never, ever afford to pay back. My children could not afford it, grandchildren, nothing like that."

He spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America before the bank removed the charge and the overdrawn fee. In a statement, Visa Debit Processing Services said:

"Late yesterday, July 13, 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."