I read in the news earlier that a man named Josh Muszynski was charged $23,148,855,308,184,500 (that’s over $23 quadrillion) after he purchased a pack of cigarettes at the local gas station with his debit card. When he was interviewed by WMUR-TV, Muszynski said, "I thought my card had been compromised. I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card. It was very concerning." When questioned, the bank forwarded information requests to the card company, and the card company forwarded them to the bank.

When the company responsible was interviewed by other sources, they stated that the cause of the issue was due to a programming error. If you take the overcharged amount and multiply it by 100, you get 2314885530818450000. If you convert that to hexadecimal, you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. This not only shows the language of the programming error, but why it happened. For those not fully capable of interpreting hexadecimal, most C programmers will tell you that 20 is the hexadecimal equivalent of a space. Instead of inserting zeros, spaces were used as placeholders for empty slots.