Citigroup mistakenly transfers $81 trillion to customer's account instead of $280: Report

Citigroup

Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer's account and took hours to reverse the transaction, the Financial Times reported.

The error happened last April and was missed by two officials - the payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day. A third employee caught the 'near-miss' error 90 minutes after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, the report added.

“Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry. Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank,” a Citigroup spokesperson in a statement told FT.

The statement further said the incident had no impact on the bank or its client.

There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last year, down from 13 the year before, the report added.

Last July, Citi was fined $136 million for insufficient progress in tackling those issues and in 2020, it was fined $400 million for some risk and data failures, Reuters reported.

Jane Fraser, who took over as Citi’s top executive from Corbat in 2021, described fixing Citi’s regulatory issues as her “top priority.” Still, the group was fined $136 million last year by the OCC and Federal Reserve for failing to correct problems in risk control and data management.

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With inputs from agencies