Driver Fills up Gas Tank, Receives Bill For $81 Billion
By TheCatLady
@TheCatLady (4691)
Israel
March 1, 2009 5:46am CST
Juan Zamora filled up his car for $26 and paid with his Paypal credit card. You would think the bill would be $26. No? Well he got a bill for $81,400,836,908. Yup 81 billion. He called the customer service people to complain and fix it because obviously it has to be a mistake. There is no way he could fit that much gas in a gas tank even if the station had it for sale. I took him a while to convince the person on the phone that even though he put gas in his car it wasn't 81 billion dollars worth. The idiot on the other end of the line thought that if he put gas in his car at that station, it must a true and corect bill.
I guess it was a good thing he saved his receipt.
5 people like this
16 responses
@Spook619 (335)
•
1 Mar 09
bliddy heck... That makes me think I should keep a better track of my recipts. It is scary though, who made the mistake do you reckon? Paypal or the gas company? Has some trucking buisness somewhere been charged $26 for several million gallons of diesel?
4 people like this
@laydee (12798)
• Philippines
2 Mar 09
Whew, it sure is fortunate of him to have kept the receipts. Anyhow, 81 Billion would have been obviously mistaken, but what if it was just $30 or $50, that would have hurt if he can't prove it was a mistake.
I guess at these times of financial difficulties, we should be patient enough to check and recheck our finances. Not to mention that if problems like these occur, perhaps it's better to pay in cash.
2 people like this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
The don't know who or how the mistake was made. It's a huge mistake, not just a misplaced decimal point.
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
The person on the other end of the phone wasn't in the USA, but still with the difference in currency, they must have known that 80 billion isn't an amount that you can put in a gas tank. You'd think they have some idea on what a dollar is worth. Even with weird hyper inflated currencies like the old Turkish Lira you would only be able to put about 25 million in a gas tank.
1 person likes this
@irisheyes (4370)
• United States
2 Mar 09
Wow, makes me want to check my Paypal debit card but I didn't use it lately so I guess it's okay. Mybe not. Paypal makes a lot of mistakes and they will not back down easily. On a much smaller level, I had them insiist that it would take one month to clear an Echeck from a guy who lived ten miles from me and used the same bank as I did. Even when the guy proved to them that the check had cleared in two days, they still made us wait four weeks. I stopped accepting their EChecks after that one. Don't know what I'd do if I got a receipt like that one for gas. LOL
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
They love to make you wait because they get to use the money for those few weeks. The longer you have to wait to use your money, the more they get in interest from your money.
@fasttalker (2796)
• United States
1 Mar 09
Well you know how it is...Those gas prices just keep rising! 
Seriously it is scary that that could happen that easily. You would think the lady on the other end would have used some common sense!
Seriously it is scary that that could happen that easily. You would think the lady on the other end would have used some common sense! 1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
People working those jobs don't use any sense. They have a script that they read for each each comment. They don't even have to think. That's a problem.
1 person likes this
@Cillysophie (327)
• United States
1 Mar 09
I wonder why it's called common sense sense it's so rare to find in society these days... I know I'm lacking a good bit of it. LMAO
@catdla1 (6005)
• United States
1 Mar 09
That's funny. Too bad some one wasn't filming his face (for YouTube) when he opened the bill...lol. Geeze, just a few fillups could make a nice dent in the national debt...then he would need a government bailout. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets.
I wonder how long it would have taken him to convince the customer service person if the mistake had been reversed, and reflected an 81 billion credit? 
3 people like this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
If the mistake was reversed I'm sure the computer would catch it.
1 person likes this
@2yolysempowering (114)
• United States
1 Mar 09
wow unreal, I usually do ask for a gas receipt for everything, it's interesting when you watch what and how you spend each month.
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
Unreal describes it. I watch every penny because of these hard times.
1 person likes this
@2yolysempowering (114)
• United States
4 Mar 09
Yeap, I know what ya mean. We will see good times again.
@melissapalardy (213)
• United States
2 Mar 09
that is the craziest thing i have ever heard. i am glad to hear that he was able to take care of it though. that is messed up
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
It's a bit messed up. It's just plain weird. Can you imagine the prob;ems if the person in customer support didn't finally get it that there was an error.
@healer (1779)
• India
2 Mar 09
OMG! that was a huge amount of money anyway computers too make mistakes, as it is only designed by humans. I could picture the situation that you have mentioned above and the conversation with the customer care would have been interesting. Anyway from this we should learn a lesson that we should always keep the receipt that we have shopped for because we never know what will happen.
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
Computers do make mistakes. This one was a doozy. It would have been funny if he taped the conversation.
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
I'd be thrilled to have that kid of a limit on my cards. That is if I could afford to pay that much.
@pyewacket (43903)
• United States
2 Mar 09
Makes you wonder what kind of idiot that man was dealing with, when he called customer service for paypal ..like duh? There's no car gas tank in the world that could hold that much gas...how the heck did the bill get so high anyway? I mean how many people charge $81 billion???
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
Not even Donald Trump charges that amount to fill all his cars in a year. There is no way anyone can use that much gas.
@snowcat46 (2322)
• United States
2 Mar 09
Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't they believe he didn't put 81 billion dollars worth of gas in his vehicle? Doesn't everyone have a tank that big? Honestly, the price of gas seems to sky-rocket some days, doesn't it? @TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
I guess gas has really gone up. 81 billion for a tank, no big deal. Ya right. The customer service rep wasn't the smartest if he/she didn't immediately know that that was an impossible sum.
@elysium (169)
• United States
2 Mar 09
That is such a sad story, yet funny. It was a good thing that Juan Zamora saved his receipt. I think that gas station attendant should be fired and replaced. I cannot believe that one the Paypal customer service people really believed that the bill must have been correct and took it as a laughing matter. That gas station should pay Juan Zamora eighty - one billion dollars for their mistake.
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
I don't think the station attendant was at fault. All he does is put the card through the machine. The computer made a mistake, or the system was hacked causing the computer to make the mistake.
1 person likes this
@monsterj1 (188)
•
2 Mar 09
Imagine the size of the gas tank and the vehicle it was powering, was it the space shuttle?
1 person likes this
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
Even the space shuttle couldn't hold that much gas. Wow. It's enough gas to last a few hundred lifetimes.
1 person likes this
@shinjukusai08 (23)
• Philippines
2 Mar 09
it happens to me once, ive purchased 370.00 on a hardware store, and when my billing arrives it appeared 37,000.00, wtf, i immediately called the card company, and luckily its only a computer error.
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
That's an understandable computer error. Someone just put the decimal in the wrong place. Usually those kinds of errors get flagged and checked out by a real person. My card gets flagged any time I do something not normal for me. I usually charge under $100 and anything over is very unusual.
@BarBaraPrz (47313)
• St. Catharines, Ontario
1 Mar 09
Eighty-one billion dollars worth of gas!?! I can't imagine how much that would be, even when gas was at it's highest cost. Where was this?
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
I don't remember were it was. It was obviously a big computer mistake. My gosh what a mistake.
1 person likes this
@IkeofCrimea (2)
• United States
2 Mar 09
I have a feeling that this didn't happen. While this could be possible, it's hard for a computer to mistake 81 billion dollars for 26. Also, who has 81 billion dollars in a freaking PayPall account????
Honestly, this should be made at least a little more believable. Maybe around a hundred? I could see a 260 dollar charge... It's easy enough to move a single decimal point. But 81 billion?
Come on...
@TheCatLady (4691)
• Israel
2 Mar 09
I don't know. It is so weird that it must have happened. If he was making it up, why would he make up such a weird number?
