The American bank Citigroup accidentally transferred $81 trillion to a clientʼs account instead of $280.
The Financial Times learned about this from an internal bank report.
This happened in April 2024 — the incident had not been previously reported. The erroneous transaction was missed by two bank employees, and was only discovered by a third employee, and only an hour and a half after the transfer. The payment was canceled within a few hours.
The funds were not withdrawn from the bank (there was no such amount anyway). The situation, which was called a "near miss", was reported to the Federal Reserve and the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
A Citigroup representative confirmed the incident. At the same time, he noted that a payment of this size would not have been possible anyway. The system has safeguards that quickly detect an error and notify employees.
In 2024, Citigroup had 10 such “near misses” worth a billion dollars or more. In 2023, there were 13 such cases. In recent years, Citigroup has been improving its financial transaction control system. Especially after the 2020 incident, when the bank mistakenly transferred $900 million to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon.
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