Citigroup incorrectly credited Customer’s account $ 81 trillion instead of $ 280

A Citigroup customer may have been surprised to see a lot of extra zeros in its account balance after the bank credited the $ 81 trillion account instead of $ 280 by mistake.

According to Economic timesThe incorrect internal transfer occurred in April 2024 and was missed by a payment employee and a second official who was assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be treated at the beginning of the business the next day.

A third employee captured the mistake 90 minutes after the payment was published in the account, and it then took several hours for the transaction to be reversed, Times reported, with reference to an internal report and two people familiar with the event.

No funds left Citigroup, who revealed “Near Miss” to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the foreign exchange controller (OCC), told another person with knowledge of the event.

In a statement to humans, Citigroup said that the Banking Institute’s “detective checks immediately identified the input error.”

“Although a payment of this size could not actually have been implemented, our detective checks immediately identified the input error between two Citi Ledger accounts, and we turned the post,” The statement read. “Our preventive checks would also have stopped all the funds that left the bank.”

Citigroup added: “Although there was no impact on the bank or our client, the section emphasizes our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls through our transformation.”

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The transaction error is the latest in a series of such mistakes in Citigroup. In 2022, an employee in the bank was accidentally dedicated to a trade and died a massive sale of shares that caused a crash in Europe, per New York Times.

Last year, British supervisory authorities fined Citigroup $ 62 million, about $ 78 million, during the incident.

By 2020, the bank accidentally linked $ 893 million to a group of Revlon Inc. -Lönnivare, which seemed to pay a loan that was not due until 2023, when it actually intended to send an interest payment of $ 7.8 million, per interest payment, per Permannn Reutants.

The same year, OCC met the bank with A fine of $ 400 million for “its prolonged failure to establish effective risk management and data control programs and internal controls.”

At Citigroup’s 2024 Annual shareholder meetingCEO Jane Fraser – who succeeded Michael Corbat in the top role in March 2021 – said that the bank “made meaningful progress in our transformation by strengthening our risk and controls and data.”

However, the US regulators fined the bank $ 136 million last year to make “insufficient progress” when fixing its data management issues identified in 2020, Reutants reported.