Which Wall Street bank accidentally sent $81 TRILLION to a customer's account?

A major Wall Street bank made a colossal error in 2024, when a customer whose account was due a credit of 280 bucks was accidentally sent $81 TRILLION!

An anonymous insider has spilled the beans on the incident, which they say was reported to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to a report from the FT. The incident happened in 2024 but has only just come to light.

The report says that Citigroup’s error was not picked up by either a payments employee or by an official was tasked with checking the transaction before it was processed. The mistake was picked up and reversed when a third employee noticed a problem with the bank’s account balances, around 90 minutes of the credit being made. 

Citi says that it would not have been possible for the erroneous transaction to have sent funds outside of the bank due to detective controls that identified an error between two ledgers.

However, the report quotes the bank as highlighting the advantages of automation over manual processes: “While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls.”

It’s not the first time that Citi has been involved in one of these so-called ‘near misses’ as in 2020 it sent $900 million to Revlon lenders instead of a planned interest payment. With some refusing to return the funds, legal action followed and the mistake proved costly for Citi which recovered $400 million but lost $500 million as a judge ruled the recipients could keep it.

The FT report says that it wasn’t Citi’s only near miss of 2024 either. It cites an internal report revealing 10 such errors last year that involved at least $1 billion, down from 13 in 2023. Banks are not required to report these errors to regulators so public records are far from comprehensive.

Last year Citi was fined $135.5 million by the Fed and the OCC for failing to fix problems with its data quality management and risk management, although this was not directly related to near misses.

Other notable near misses include $6 billion sent to a US hedge fund by a junior employee at Deutsche Bank in 2015 due to a clerical error. All of the money was recovered the next day. Deutsche also accidentally transferred $35 billion to an external account in 2018. Again, all of the funds were recovered.

Often misdirected funds are due to errors by consumers when using online or telephone banking, but last year an Ontario couple lost $8,620 for four months after a bank employee mistakenly sent the payment to American Express directly instead of via Scotiabank to pay the couple’s credit card bill.

“They couldn't do it over the internet or anything else because it was a high amount. It had to be done by an RBC employee and it was them that lost it,” Mr Bamford told CTV News.

RBC initially claimed it was not their fault but an investigation found that was not the case.

“We reviewed the matter and can confirm that the issue our client experienced was the result of a processing error, which we are correcting,” the bank told CTV News.