The $61 Billion Dollar PayPal Error
Reader Dan tried to purchase a product mentioned on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, but it turned out to be a little pricey:
The item is priced at $28.95, which TUAW said seemed a bit high. It seemed fair to me. I should have listened. When I went through the purchase process and clicked "buy," my Paypal order screen listed the price as $61,803,552,167.70 USD.Silly Dan, you accidentally tried to buy the one manufactured by Halliburton. —MEGHANN MARCONo kidding. I've attached the screen shot.
I guess I should always listen to TUAW.
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
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Comments:
Do you think he could do a chargeback & get credited?
Good thing there was no tax!
hello, NSF!
I would hope the comedy of errors would get laughed off at the bank and no NSF fees. LOL
It's all just a cover for selling nukes to other countries. Or maybe Apple just has an all-new way of eliminating the competition...
He still has to pay the NSF charge, and every three days after that until they get their money!
Adrienne Zurub
author of 'NOtes From the MotherShip~Naked Invisibles'
Similar thing happened with me once, but it was with Amazon and involved a credit. I guess it had something to do with the fact that the item I was returning I had bought with a gift card, but I ended up with a $10 billion credit. I have since lost the email, but needless to say I was gasping when I recieved it.
These new DRM free prices are outrageous.
@scoobydoo:
Nahh, the long time employee was just let go so that they could hire this new kid at minimun wage and no health care. The check went through! Yippee!
Adrienne Zurub
"Dan"...perhaps a pseudonym for one guy who could afford the purchase? But why--unless he's used his own products-- would Bill Gates be shopping at Apple?
that's less than HALF what America got on the Iraq Emergency Spending Bill.
A math overflow error of some sort?
Well, I was a customer of X.com, the internet bank that got consumed by PayPal during the great dot.boom and they had a massive bug in their web application that made it seem that you either had millions of dollars in your account or a negative balance in the billions. I wonder if this poor soul happened across some recycled code of theirs.
Wow. What an oddly specific number.
Recently I was writing a donation checkout system with the PayPal API and I calculated the total price first, fed it to paypal and then the quantity, and anyone who was making a donation would have been charged the amount of what they were donating * how many times they were donating ^ 2.
Not a pretty price.
Wow! Did PayPal issue a response to you yet about this? It could be an issue with PayPal or with the way the TUAW webmaster configured the product PayPal shopping cart (although, I highly doubt PayPal's software will allow anyone to set such a high number).
They fixed the error, it shows the correct amount now :)
I would probably make the purchase just to see what happens! My PayPal account is linked to a free checking account that I don't keep money in except when I need to pay someone via PayPal...
Whoa....did someone hire a Halliburton accountant? Um that's where all the Halliburton accountants are going!
I'd love to see Paypal try and debit that from his checking account. I wonder if that'll set off a fraud alert at his bank :D