Y2k error brings billions for on-line banking customer

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http://www.akhbar.com/article/0,1690,Business-9867,00.html

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Y2K error brings billions for on-line banking customer

An on-line customer found billions of unspecified currency in his bank account erroneously credited to him.

January 03, 2000, 10:28 AM

GERMANY (AFP) - The switch-over to 2000 was not completely free from the effects of the millennium bug for a number of banking customers here, the German news agency DPA reported on Monday.

An on-line customer of the local Cologne savings bank could scarely believe his eyes when he logged in on Saturday to examine his bank account: it showed a balance of 3,930,129,930, but the currency was not specified, DPA reported.

Similarly, a 43-year-old customer with the same bank found that nearly 13 million marks (6.65 million euros, dollars) had been erroneously credited to his account.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), January 03, 2000

Answers

Thanks Homer... I guess I'd take it in euros.

Banks are fine, btw. No problem.

Mike

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-- Mike Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), January 03, 2000.


Nice to see you up and posting, Homer!

-- Ludi (ludi@rollin.com), January 03, 2000.

H O M E R !!

Welcome back, Happy New Year, and

Let the articles loose!

-- :-) (batty@facts.appreciated), January 03, 2000.


Hmm...using and adjusted mark to dollar ratio of 1.83 marks to the dollar, and assuming the summ was listed in Marks, then ole' boy had roughly 2,147,611,983 Dollars US in his account...Can anyone say "withdrawal/money transfer? How 'bout Cayman Islands?...man...whatever possessed him to question that figure?

-- Billy Boy (Rakkasan101st@Aol.com), January 03, 2000.

If the return of homer doesn't give a clue, I don't know what will.

I mean as far as I can tell this person has NEVER interjected the ole EGO.

Homer the fact that you are back reporting is not a good sign!!

-- d........... (dciinc@aol.com), January 03, 2000.



HOMER, BACK ON THE JOB!

Good to see you back posting. Hope your rollover was uneventful, now back to work, my appreciation in advance.

-- Guy Daley (guydaley@bwn.net), January 03, 2000.


That number is supisciously large. It tends to look like the result of rollover in an unsigned integer then recasted to a signed integer and the converted to a float. Anything just less than 4 billion smacks of a negative number that has been recast. I have seen lots of bugs like this because our product uses lots of unsigned 32 bit values which are read from counters. These values are differenced with the previous reading to produce a difference and that should always be positive. Since the counters are monotonic up counters, the result is unsigned and negative numbers just turn into overflow which makes a very large unsigned value. That is then converted to something else, i.e. an integer or possibly a float.

The balance tends to look like something that was computed with this kind of difference....perhaps 00 - 99? :-(

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 03, 2000.


Transfering it to savings for just a day or two and giving it back on the first workday, would net a lot of interest *grin*.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), January 03, 2000.

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