118,503,000,000,000,000 Won in My Account? ...A Dazzling Mistake Made by a US Bank

Deposit Error: $280 Mistakenly Becomes $81 Trillion Due to Employee Mistake
Error Detected and Transfer Canceled Within 90 Minutes

U.S. Citigroup accidentally transferred $81 trillion (approximately 11,850.3 quadrillion KRW) to a customer account and hurriedly canceled the transaction, a late report revealed.

Citigroup Headquarters in New York, USA. Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News

On the 1st (local time), foreign media including CNBC reported on a mistake made by two Citigroup employees last April. At that time, U.S. Citigroup intended to send $280 (about 410,000 KRW) to a customer account but mistakenly transferred $81 trillion. However, both the payment processing employee and the transaction verification employee failed to detect the error, and the transaction was approved to be processed at the start of the next business day.

Fortunately, a third employee who noticed an issue with the bank account balance caught the error within 90 minutes of the transfer, allowing the transaction to be canceled. Citigroup explained, "Our internal control system quickly identified the input error and canceled the transfer," adding, "This mechanism also prevented funds from leaving the bank." Furthermore, they stated, "Although this incident ultimately had no impact on the bank or customers, it reminded us of the importance of continuous efforts to automate processes."

According to an internal report obtained by foreign media, Citigroup experienced 10 "near-miss mistakes" last year. While the amount processing errors were corrected and funds recovered, the total scale exceeded $1 billion (about 1.463 trillion KRW). Foreign media reported, "Several former regulatory officials and bank risk managers said that mistakes exceeding $1 billion are unusual across the U.S. banking industry."

This incident has drawn criticism that Citigroup still has not resolved operational issues even after a major accident in 2020 when it mistakenly transferred $900 million (1.3167 trillion KRW) to creditors of the cosmetics group Revlon. That incident led to the dismissal of Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat, hefty fines, and regulatory orders demanding problem resolution. Jane Fraser, who became Citigroup CEO in 2021, emphasized solving this issue as a "top priority," but last year, failure to correct risk controls and data management problems resulted in fines of $136 million (198.968 billion KRW) imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve Board.