Kids these days! Hawkins writes, “My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday [my teenaged daughter] charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store.” You would think Visa would have caught the error and addressed it, if you were high. What Visa actually did was slap a $20 “negative balance” fee on it, of course. Update: Here’s what happened!
The embarrassingly-named VISA BUXX card is a debit card for teenagers: parents get reports, control, etc. My daughter has one.
My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday she charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store. That’s 2,000 times more than the national debt, which is a paltry 11 trillion.
The ever-vigilant folks at VISA added a $20 “negative balance fee,” and have suspended the card.
When I called, they said that there was a “system problem,” and that the “help desk was working on it.”
Note: Some readers have speculated that the number is the credit card number, but the OP says in the comments that it’s not:
Wow, I didn’t think of that before I submitted this story to Consumerist. Wouldn’t that be ironic cosmic retribution? Jerky consumer puts VISA’s honest programming mistake on display for the world to make snarky sarcastic comments about… but then it turns out that he’s just posted the debit card number!
Happily, this is not the case. Please carry on with the caustic commentary.
In that same thread, another commenter named mlcastle points out the series of digits fails the Luhn check, a simple checksum formula invented in the 1950s, and so cannot be a valid credit card number.
Update 2: Hawkins posted a follow up on page 3 of the comments:
I have an update, if anybody’s interested.
The issue was with VISA, not with CVS. Apparently lots of VISA debit card users were affected by it, at several different merchants. Each victim was charged exactly $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.
The folks at VISA have removed the 23-Grillion dollar charge, but not the $20 negative-balance fee. They promise to do so “as soon as this is all sorted out.”
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How the hell does one get to charge such an amount? I think it’s scary that the system can even handle such a number. If it had lots of zeros, maybe that might make more sense. This has a bunch of digits, so it had to come from somewhere. Who rang that up on the register?
That’s a lot of Plan B…
I have an update, if anybody’s interested.
The issue was with VISA, not with CVS. Apparently lots of VISA debit card users were affected by it, at several different merchants. Each victim was charged exactly $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.
The folks at VISA have removed the 23-Grillion dollar charge, but not the $20 negative-balance fee. They promise to do so “as soon as this is all sorted out.”
@Hawkins: that doesn’t make any sense. they acknowledge it was their problem, but they’re still hanging on to your money. for you, this is only your daughter’s card, but i can see a lot of people running in to serious problems with this.
Just for grins I checked to see how long it would take me to pay that off, assuming I pay every cent I make and I work a 2000 hour work year every year until I do and it would take me…7.82×10^11 years, or 782,055,922,300 years, which is what, 70 times the age of the known observable Universe?
Do you get frequent flier miles on that card? “TO THE MOON!!!”
From the discussion over at boingboing ([www.boingboing.net]), guesses at what might have happened are:
1. It’s actually a credit card number.
a. A $2.31 charge followed by a credit card number (4885… would be VISA). Except that number fails the Luhn test, *so I’ll rule this option out*.
b. A truncated leading “4″ followed by a credit card number, padded by four trailing 0′s. That passes the Luhn test, and falls within the VISA range of number per ISO/IEC 7812. Still, *unlikely* since another commenter confirmed that her child had the same charge (unless she only glanced at the first few digits before ‘confirming’). UPDATE: actually another user had the same charge and provided a screenshot, except the hundreds digit was a 6 (ending in 600 vice 500).
2. Some sort of encoding error–more likely. It was pointed out that, written in hex, the charge is 0×2020202020201250. That’s 8 bytes (well, 62 bits…pad the front with two 0s). Most likely a data typing error in an older or loosely typed language.
0×20 is ASCII for space. Perhaps the charge amount (in hex form) was accidentally parsed as a string and space padded to 16 bytes? Lot’s of older languages space-pad their strings. Only problem is the other user ([boardsix.com]) who was charged 0×2020202020203960 when he bought a hamburger. A 0×3960 hamburger is $146.88…hmm.
I would call up visa and request a check for my 2% cash back reward! I’m going shopping tonight!!
Sounds like it’s their mistake and they’re doing something about it. Something like this has more of a place on TheDailyWTF.com than The Consumerist.
Why would a teenage girl have a credit card in the first place. Most adults cannot handle a line of credit responsibly. Now they would give one to a teen?
Visa mistake or not I would never trust a teen with a card in the first place. I barely tolerate teen cell phones! (Have seen many $500+ bills from a teen downloading or texting on their parents dollar when I worked for a cell phone call center.)
@evilhapposai:
It’s a debit card. Not a credit card. Big difference there.
If you actually read the article, you would have seen:
“The embarrassingly-named VISA BUXX card is a debit card for teenagers: parents get reports, control, etc. My daughter has one.”
I take it the reader lets his daughter watch South Park and decided to pull a Kyle and bailout the entire city on his credit card… except your daughter chose the world and a few galaxies.
Okay that was clearly a mistake on that card one kid couldn’t buy THAT much stuff from a drug store, a drug store doesn’t even have that much stuff, credit cards have limits. and that exceeds it.
This just proves we need to reign in drug prices at the pharmacy.
Holy shit. I don’t even know where to begin with this one except that I’d probably report my card as lost or stolen and never renew the card. EVER.
Jesus.. This should have tripped an error at the bank for sure. Bank is prolly wondering how to transfer that kind of money to CVS.. lol
FYI if you the remove the extra zeros it seems to pass the luhn check.
Start at the left, take 16 digits and put that into a checker and it seems to work (well it worked at http://planzero.org/code/bits/examples/luhn_check.php anyway)
So it could indeed be the credit card number, but its been fudged with extra zeros for some reason.
@Hawkins:
This seems like a programming issue. I bet some code (merchant) plus the amount had a “test value” put in that someone forgot and when it happened this time the amount was replaced with this ridiculous figure.
I do the same thing when testing reports. I take the longest name in the system and use it for checking the spacing on the report. If I ever forget my hardcode and move it into production then the name would show on all reports (did happen once 10 years ago).
I bet they found the code error.
The $20 is as big an issue as the original fraudulent charge. This is one thing they didn’t address adequately in the upcoming credit card reforms. If they can apply a charge to my card in seconds refunds should happen just as quickly. PERIOD. No 4-6 days, weeks etc bs.
I am a single mother form Virginia Beach VA. Monday night I checked my Bank of America account and it was a NEGATIVE -$69,446,565,924,553,600. 3 charges from The DolllarTtree for the amount of -23,148,855,308,184,500 created this.I spent $12 at that store!! Bank of America has not fixed my account yet and has suspened it! All before my son’s 16th birthday. They have not helped me in anyway!!
It looks like Visa is being hacked.
Since the numbers are the same, appearing in different locations, it’s coming from inside the system.
Convert it to hexadecimal, 523DC2E199EBB4, it looks like Intel assembly code with a handy jump at the end to something else:
push dx
cmp ax,E1C2
cwd
jmp 00BB
Bet Visa people are going to be working late for a while to figure this one out…
My son’s charge was with a Wachovia Visa Buxx card and came through as a charge at Subway! That’s way too may $5 foot long subs!!
The actual charger was $12.00. If you convert 2314885530818450000 to hexidecimal it’s 2020202020201200, conveniently the hexidecimal value of an ASCII Space (hitting the space bar) is 20, so those are just 6 leading spaces before the decimal value (and converted to hex).
I am forwarding this to my senator right now. 23 bada-quada-kazillion dollars just might be enough to balance the national budget.