Say What Now? Citigroup Mistakenly Credited a Customer Account with $81 Trillion

Citigroup mistakenly credited one of their customers $81 trillion when it was initially supposed to be $280.

The error took place last April and was missed by a payments employee and a second worker before it was cleared to process the following day, according to the newspaper, which cited an internal account and two people familiar with the matter.

A third employee discovered the error an hour and a half after the payment was processed; the transaction was reversed several hours later, the Financial Times said.

No funds left the bank and the “near miss” was disclosed to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the report said.

“Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts, and we reversed the entry,” a Citigroup spokesperson stated in an email. “Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.”

The incident did not affect the bank or the customer, Citi added.

The bank experienced 10 near misses of $1 billion or more in 2024, down from 13 such cases the prior year, according to the FT, which cited an internal report.

via: CBS News

Citigroup Mistakenly Credited a Customer Account with $81 Trillion

Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer’s account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a “near miss” that shows up the bank’s operational issues it has sought to fix, the Financial Times first reported on Friday.

The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day, FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with the event.

A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, FT said.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the near miss – when a bank processes the wrong amount but is able to recover the funds – to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the report said.

Citi told Reuters in an emailed statement its “detective controls” promptly identified the inputting error between two ledger accounts and that it reversed the entry, adding the incident had no impact on the bank or the client.

There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last year, down from 13 the year before, according to an internal report seen by the FT. Citi declined to comment to FT on this report.

Last month, Citi CFO Mark Mason said the bank is investing more to address its compliance issues, referring to regulatory penalties for risk management and data governance.

“We saw the need to invest more in the transformation on data, on technology, on improving the quality of the information coming out of our regulatory reporting,” Mason said.

Last July, Citi was fined $136 million for insufficient progress in tackling those issues and in 2020, it was fined $400 million for some risk and data failures.

via: CNN

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