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$81 Billion Gas Tab

Posted by samzenpus on from the really-big-tank dept.

denobug writes "Ever wonder how expensive a tank of gas could get? How about $81 billion! Juan Zamora had his PayPal debit card maxed out after a routine gas fill up, the transaction cost him $81,400,836,908. Makes me wonder whether the glitch is the debit card transaction system or in PayPal's system."

9 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. PayPal for Losers by unlametheweak · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So he called customer service for PayPal... [who] argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes. Like I had to prove that I didn't pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!

    Yes, in the late 1990s I had trouble with PayPal. I emailed customer service about a dozen times and never got a response back. I have never considered using PayPal again.

    1. Re:PayPal for Losers by v1 · · Score: 1

      paypal, along with ebay and other services that have an insane number of customers and a virtual product, all have nonexistent support. You just have to pray you don't ever have a serious problem.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    2. Re:PayPal for Losers by LameAssTheMity · · Score: 1

      your UID is oddly inverse to mine.

  2. 30 kilograms by s1lhouette · · Score: 2, Informative

    Assuming 2 dollars per gallon, the man would have had to purchase 40700418454 gallons of fuel to generate such a bill. That is 1.54067844 × 1011 liters, 154 067 844 cubic meters or 0.154067844 cubic kilometers of fuel. Lets just say, having that much fuel in one place would be a good example of a bad idea.

    Lets consider how much energy that would be. Assuming 34.8 MJ per liter there would be 5.36156097 × 10^18 Joules of energy. The Hiroshima bomb released about 6.3×10^13 joules of energy. That would make it about 85104.1424 Hiroshima bombs or about 30 kilograms of antimatter.

    1. Re:30 kilograms by MyLongNickName · · Score: 2, Funny

      Turns out that the guy got an account number confused for the bill.

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    2. Re:30 kilograms by MyLongNickName · · Score: 1

      I am not sure why the above post is funny. It is actually true. The follow up to the story was the guy actually read his account number on the bill and figured that is the amount of the bill. Great journalism.... how hard would it have been for the journalist to look at the bill and go "ummmmm.... dude... you are not smart". Instead, this stroy circulated for about 24 hours in different media outlets.

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    3. Re:30 kilograms by Chih · · Score: 1

      TY for posting "kg of antimatter". That is one of the few standard measures I understand, along with LoC.

      --
      For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
  3. Re:PayPal ruining the eBay experience by scourfish · · Score: 1

    Cry me a river.

  4. Paypal account recently hacked by greg_barton · · Score: 1

    My paypal account was recently hacked, and I'm currently in the hole $1400, including bank overdraft fees. It wasn't just my account, too. Two other accounts were compromised (at least) because there were bogus transactions between my account and theirs. That tells me that more accounts were probably compromised, as this could have been a shotgun sequence of attacks.

    Needless to say, my paypal account will be closed as soon as I'm refunded. I have no idea if my overfraft fees ($160 and counting) will ever be recovered.