A bank error resulted in an electrician’s bank account being in the red by over 63 billion kroner

An electrician from Hillerød got a nasty shock at the end of March when checking his online bank account to discover a withdrawal of 63 billion kroner had been made.

Ekstra Bladet newspaper reports that Dennis Pallesgaard had been expecting to see a minus of 3,200 kroner from a mortgage deed registration on a recent property deal, but the bank apparently decided to overdraw his account by a further 63,002,842,493 kroner as well.

‘I had heard about high bank fees, but it was so crazy that I had to count the number of figures to work out that it wasn’t millions, but billions they had withdrawn,’ said Pallesgaard.

The 32-year-old quickly notified the bank which then rectified the error. They had mistakenly entered an account number instead of the correct amount that should have been withdrawn. If Pallesgaard had been left with a minus of 63 billion kroner on his account, the interest payments alone would have come to 29 million kroner a day.

Pallesgaard joked that if the money had been deposited into his account rather than withdrawn he might have been tempted to ‘do a Stein Bagger and take off to Dubai or somewhere else without an extradition treaty and live out my days in the lap of luxury’.