Details on Visa 17 Digit Glitch

The other day, some Visa cardholders received overpriced bills for ordinary services. In the printouts of card transactions, people saw an astronomical amount of $ 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 (23.1 quadrillion dollars) plus a fine of $ 15 for an overdraft on the card. This amount is many times higher than world GDP. Banks and Visa, after a short trial, reported that the error was caused by a technical glitch, but did not disclose any details.

But in fact, the amount of the erroneously debited payment in itself reveals the nature of the error. So look at this number

$ 23.148.855.308.184.500.00

Most likely, on the card it is stored as

2314885530818450000

If we translate it into the hexadecimal system, we will get

20 20 20 20 20 20 12 12 50

Most C / C ++ programmers have already realized what the error is, because hex 20 is a space. That is, as a result, most likely, programming errors in the data cell turned out to be spaces instead of zeros.

via slashdot