"You owe us $211 trillion"

Quote:

COBB COUNTY, Ga. -- It’s one thing to bounce a check and it’s another to be so far in the red Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Donald Trump combined couldn’t come close to bailing you out. A Cobb County man got a letter from his bank with that very shocking news.

“And I open up the letter and I look at it and I’m like, ‘No, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Joe Martins.

Martins said he recently closed an account at Wachovia Bank and made good on an outstanding check. He just got a letter about the closure and his negative balance -- $211,010,028,257,303.00. That’s $211 trillion.

The letter includes the clarification, “no cents.”

“I didn’t know what to think. Obviously $211 trillion is a little above what I put in my bank account,” said Martins.

$211 trillion is more than 70 times the entire federal budget.

Still, the letter said Wachovia was reporting him to an agency that rates risky bank customers.

“I don’t own $211 trillion but because it is automated and reported to check systems, I assume it will be reported to my credit at some point,” said Martins.

He said Wachovia had made mistakes on his accounts before so he called Channel 2 first. Wachovia blamed the letter on a word processing error and the office of the president is sending a letter of apology.

“They tell me it’s going to be resolved but I’m not sure that it will,” said Martins. “I closed my account today.”

Since it is a closed account it is now safe to say the dollar figure in the letter matched the account number.

Martins said Wachovia told him late Friday afternoon they never did report him for his negative balance. Wachovia vice president David Oliver told Channel 2, “We can certainly understand how our recent correspondence with Mr. Martins about his account would be cause for great concern. I can confirm that there will be no adverse effect on Mr. Martins’ credit report related to the letter he received. Also, I can confirm that this was an isolated error specifically related to his account.”

Talk about being off by a few numbers.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Blast it. We KNEW we should have set up our computers to handling numbers more than 32 bit. Or something,

Yeah, haha, now THAT would be quite an eye-opener for a letter. I do wonder how that could have seriously happened. You'd think that a person would kinda keep an eye out for an amount that is more than the wealthest people in the world could pay....

There's nowhere I can't reach.

And if it weren't for you pesky kids, we [Wachovia] would be trillionaires!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

The average lifetime income for a high school graduate is only 1.2 million dollars. This means Wachovia would have owned him and his next of kin for the next 175,000 generations until the debt was paid off.

...Or he could've become an evil overlord or something not unlike COBRA and secure all the finances of an entire small country's worth of slave labor for about 200 years. But I think his method of informing the media about the mistake was probably for the best.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by mortis

Blast it. We KNEW we should have set up our computers to handling numbers more than 32 bit. Or something,

Yeah, haha, now THAT would be quite an eye-opener for a letter. I do wonder how that could have seriously happened. You'd think that a person would kinda keep an eye out for an amount that is more than the wealthest people in the world could pay....

Sorry but no human eye look at most notices that are mailed from a bank. The notices/letters/statements are printed and stuffed into envelopes by a machine in most cases. No one double checks the notice/letter/statement to make sure they are accurate, because many banks send out thousands of statements and hundreds of NSF notices every day. A bank the size of Wachovia will most likely mail tens of thousands of statements each day, and several thousand NSF {non-sufficient funds} notices each day.

I was speaking idiomatically.