Details about the 17-character Visa glitch

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

But in fact, the amount of the wrongly written off payment in itself reveals the nature of the error. 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 hexadecimal, then we get

20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50

Most C / C ++ programmers have already understood what the error is, because hex 20 is a space. That is, as a result, most likely, programming errors in the data cell were gaps instead of zeros.

via slashdot