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April Fools Sees Fake Extra Millions For Users of Brokerage Site
Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake. Users logged on to find larger balances than they should have, sometimes millions of dollars extra, and many of those users started trading with the nonexistent money. Happy April Fool's Day. "... when Zecco realized it, the company apparently started to force sell, even at a loss, charging the losses to the customers along with a '$19.99 broker-assisted trading fee.' Oops."
the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor. - Dr. Zoidberg
Sig this!
It's like a performance art piece about our worm-riddled crony capitalist mess!
Quit making excuses guys, and head on down to the gallery...
Seriously. I thought all financial institutions had given up on using Perl for their back-end systems. One misplaced _$ and suddenly everyone is swimming in money.
Next time use a strict typing language like Haskell.
I logged in to Zecco 4/1 at around 9:30 AM... my cash-on-hand was off by about $1.6 MM (balance was 1.8 MM instead of 0.2 MM). I immediately instructed Zecco to wire me the excess funds... and the funds hit my bank account at 12:02 PM!
As of today, the money is still in my account, but there is a hold on it. Apparently, the funds transfer was initiated properly, fully authorized... so my bank is holding the funds while I accrue interest on it until they determine final disposition.
Oh hell, who am I kidding... I don't have 0.2 MM in an online investment account. Hell, I don't think I have 0.2 MM is assets, unless you include my wife & daughter, who I could probably sell for that much if I found a good buyer or if there was a bidding war.
Oops... was that my out-loud voice?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I appreciate a good Perl joke as well as the next Perl hacker, but if you wedge a "_$" into your code you'll just get syntax errors. Did you mean "$_"? That error (misplaced default parameter) I've seen quite often, mostly among Perl nubs.
I can't comment on the frequency or trend of Perl back-end systems. Most back-end systems I've worked with are J2EE.
Your ideas on type-safety are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Hahaha, surely, thou art on the highway to Hell.
Ducketh thou, the swine that thou hast cast your perl before will rise up and smiteth thee.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The real solution is to move it to a Cayman Island's bank account, skip the country and then rush out to spend it wildly.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
use haskell;
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The Perl pseudocode that started it all..
1) Increase tradeable $.
2) __$_$$_$_$_$$
3) PROFIT!
I gues this all depends on location...
If it's in the contract you sign with a bank, then fair enough....
I was talking about the ethics of the situation however, not legalities.
On that score though, certainly where I live (Scotland), if you have a parking facility you offer to people under conditions (such as your car being forfeit if you don't pay), you've agreed to a contract by parking there, as long as the sign is clearly visible etc.
So tough shit....
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
for those keeping track, its: slashdot links to techdirt links to consumerist links to mymoneyblog links to zecco forums
I always thought it was:
- Slashdot links to
- Metatron links to
- God links to
- 4chan