A man who was charged a staggering $23 quadrillion for a packet of cigarettes has fortunately managed to avoid paying the bill.

The New Hampshire resident bought a packet of cigarettes at a Mobil petrol station using his Visa credit card, but when he returned home he discovered he had been charged rather more than he expected.

Eventually he managed to clear up the matter with the issuing Bank of America, and was naturally relieved not to have to pay the bill.

Visa downplayed the blunder, described as an “inaccuracy”:

“A temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services, caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts.

The technical glitch, which impacted fewer than 13,000 Visa prepaid transactions, has been corrected and erroneous postings have been removed.

Importantly, this incident had no financial impact on Visa prepaid cardholders.

Visa regrets any inconvenience to our customers and has taken immediate steps to ensure this error doesn’t occur again.”

Via Itai News.

The US GDP is only $14 trillion, so by not making this man pay an opportunity to increase the US GDP by 16,200% has been lost; such are the wonders of national income accounting…