Citigroup Mistakenly Credited Customer's Account $81 Trillion — and Multiple Employees Missed the Error

Mar. 15, 2025

Sign at a Citibank branch in New York in January 2025.Photo:Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty

A third employee caught the mistake 90 minutes after the payment was posted to the account, and it then took several hours for the transaction to be reversed, theTimesreported, citing an internal report and two people familiar with the incident.

No funds left Citigroup, which disclosed the “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), another person with knowledge of the event told the outlet.

ATM machine (stock image).Getty

Getty

In a statement to PEOPLE, Citigroup said that the banking institution’s “detective controls promptly identified the inputting error.”

“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," the statement read. “Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.”

Citigroup added: “While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls through our Transformation.”

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The transaction error is the latest in a series of such mistakes at Citigroup. In 2022, an employee of the bank accidentally added a zero to a trade, setting off a massive stock sell-off that caused a crash in Europe, perThe New York Times.

Last year, British regulators fined Citigroup 62 million pounds, about $78 million, over the incident.

In 2020, the bank accidentally wired $893 million to a group of Revlon Inc. lenders, appearing to pay off a loan not due until 2023, when it actually intended to send a $7.8 million interest payment, perReuters.

That same year, the OCC hit the bank witha $400 million finefor “its longstanding failure to establish effective risk management and data governance programs and internal controls.”

However, U.S. regulators fined the bank $136 million last year for making “insufficient progress” in fixing its data-management issues identified in 2020,Reutersreported.

source: people.com