The Next Web

Bol.com tries to draw 36.850.000.000.000.001 from shoppers credit card

Written on January 26, 2008 – 12:01 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Dutch journalist/blogger Maarten Reijnders bought a few books at Bol.com just before Christmas. He received a statement this week from his credit card company that it failed to process a payment for €36.850.000.000.000.001 and suggested he contact Bol.com.

Bol.com (NL) CEO Daniel Ropers quickly responded with a promise to find out “how it is possible that we show and charge amounts with an accuracy of 10 zeroes”.

I can’t wait to see the Q1 results of Bol.com… The expectations of the shareholders are very high, as you can imagine after a sale like this. I had to look up how to pronounce this number on wikipedia.

For the record: in US and Modern British it is: Thirty-six-quadrillion-eight-hundred-fifty-trillion-and-one Euro in traditional British it is: Thirty-six-billiard-eight-hundred-fifty-billion-and-one Euro. In Dollars? Well grab your calculator and multiply 36.850.000.000.000.001 with 1,471 (The current dollars to euro rate).

I am pretty sure Bol.com could buy the Library of Congress if they succeed in charging Reijnders card.

Thanks to Bright (Dutch)

UPDATE: The numbers in this post aren’t correct. The thing that threw me off was the sentence ‘I didn’t remember ordering the whole BOL.com catalog’ in the original article which led me to think in billions. Also see comments.

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