A New Hampshire man was charged $23 quadrillion for a pack of cigarettes.
The most amusing part, of course, is the $15 overdraft fee.
So it’s true that buying tobacco will make you go broke…
Almost identical story here. The identical figure is a little suspicious coincidence, even if both stories are from reputable sources. This guy bought dinner instead, and his card is through a different bank.
CNN says it happened to a number of people.
Yow. Somewhere shy of 13,000 people got hit for $23 quadrillion? Just needed one of them to make the monthly minumum payment to cure the national debt.
Wait! Here is my plan: I go on a shopping spree and spend 23 quadrillion dollars, then I file a chargeback.
What can I buy with that kind of money? 
I hear that’s the price of Europe.
Analysis suggests that instead of binary zeroes in the numeric field, hex 20 was placed. Eg, ASCII ‘space’. So spacespacespacespace12.50 became 202020202012.50. Convert that to hexideximal, and pop, there’s the number. (I’m simplifying, there’s a *100 issue, too, but anyhow. )
I hadn’t realized that the dollar had deflated in value so badly. We’re worse off than I had previously thought!
Maybe I’m an idiot, but if that happened to me, I think that I would close the account, pay off the rest of the balance and let the $23Q go into collections. It might be fun in a strange sort of way to protest the ding on my credit report with a defense of “Dude! That’s two thousand times bigger than the national debt of the US!!!”
I’d tell 'em I didn’t have the $23Q right now, and would it be OK if I paid in instalments of a few trillion a month until I got my finances in order.
If they refused, I’d transfer the outstanding balance to another card company.
Either Muszynski has a sense of humor or this is fake.
“It is a lot of money in the negative,” he said. “Something I could never, ever, afford to pay back. My children could not afford it, grandchildren, nothing like that.”
Ya think? I don’t think anyone getting dinged that much would really contemplate how they could pay it off.
But think of all the mileage points he got on his card!
Don’t worry, Mr. Muszynski–as the old adage goes, if you owe the bank $18,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $23 quadrillion, the bank has a problem.
In fact, everybody [del]on the Planet Earth[/del] in the Sirius Sector has a problem.
Also: I knew the Democrats were considering hiking “sin taxes” on things like tobacco in order to finance healthcare reform, but dayyum. Wait till them Canadians get a load of our new healthcare system, baby!
I know one thing you can’t buy, baby. You can’t buy love.
No, but you can park your Learjet right next to it. 
Those were only the second most expensive cigarettes in the world, since he’s still alive.
The best story on this story comes from Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,532740,00.html?mrp
“A New Hampshire man was shocked to learn that when he purchased pack of cigarettes he also got charged $23,148,855,308,184,500, or more than $23 quadrillion — a number that rivals that of the national debt.”
I like how the journalist said that $23 quadrillion RIVALS the national debt of approximately $12 trillion. In the same way that my checking account RIVALS the cost of a beach house in Malibu.
Five star hospitals!