A Citigroup customer may have been surprised to see quite a few extra zeros in their account balance after the bank credited the account $81 trillion instead of $280 by mistake.

According to the Financial Times, the erroneous internal transfer occurred in April 2024 and was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed at the start of business the next day.

A third employee caught the mistake 90 minutes after the payment was posted to the account, and it then took several hours for the transaction to be reversed, the Times reported, citing an internal report and two people familiar with the incident.

No funds left Citigroup, which disclosed the "near miss" to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), another person with knowledge of the event told the outlet.

Young woman at the automatic cash machine (ATM) on city street. Auto financial service. Personal banking.
ATM machine (stock image). 

Getty

In a statement to PEOPLE, Citigroup said that the banking institution's "detective controls promptly identified the inputting error."

“Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts, and we reversed the entry," the statement read. "Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank."

Citigroup added: "While there was no impact to the bank or our client, the episode underscores our continued efforts to continue eliminating manual processes and automating controls through our Transformation.”

The transaction error is the latest in a series of such mistakes at Citigroup. In 2022, an employee of the bank accidentally added a zero to a trade, setting off a massive stock sell-off that caused a crash in Europe, per The New York Times.

Last year, British regulators fined Citigroup 62 million pounds, about $78 million, over the incident.

In 2020, the bank accidentally wired $893 million to a group of Revlon Inc. lenders, appearing to pay off a loan not due until 2023, when it actually intended to send a $7.8 million interest payment, per Reuters.

That same year, the OCC hit the bank with a $400 million fine for "its longstanding failure to establish effective risk management and data governance programs and internal controls."

At Citigroup's 2024 annual stockholders' meeting, CEO Jane Fraser — who succeeded Michael Corbat in the top role in March 2021 — said the bank was "making meaningful strides in our Transformation by strengthening our risk and controls and data."

However, U.S. regulators fined the bank $136 million last year for making "insufficient progress" in fixing its data-management issues identified in 2020, Reuters reported.