Windfall From a Typo: A 1,000-Yuan Top-Up Became 2.6 Quadrillion Yuan, and a Court Ordered It Back
An employee who typed a 16-digit account ID into the amount field credited a Hunan man with 2.64 quadrillion yuan of virtual points; he spent 250,000 yuan of them in twenty days, refused to return the money, and has now lost in court on unjust-enrichment grounds.
The arithmetic error of the year, as Chinese social media has been relishing it: an employee at a Shanghai tech company meant to credit a customer with a 1,000-yuan top-up, but instead typed the sixteen-digit account ID of someone else's order into the amount field. The customer, a shop owner surnamed Li who buys marketing services from the platform, watched his balance jump to more than 26,419,933 hundred-million yuan — roughly 2.6 quadrillion yuan (about 2,642 trillion) in virtual points pegged one-to-one with the currency.
Li did not report it; he spent it. Over the following twenty days he burned through some 250,000 yuan of points on the platform, according to Red Star News's account of the case, a report that has been liked more than 5,000 times. The company noticed in mid-October, froze his account, clawed back what remained, terminated some undelivered services and deducted 9,400 yuan he had already used. When it sent a refund demand, Li ignored it — so the company sued.
The sums involved gave the case its wings. A balance of 2.64 quadrillion yuan is, by rough comparison, some twenty times the size of China's annual economic output — a figure that existed only as a database entry, went unnoticed by every automated check the platform ran, and sat in one man's account for twenty days. Commentators found the scale as damning as the spending: a system that can conjure quadrillions with one slipped keystroke is a system that trusts its input fields far more than it should.
A court in Ningxiang, Hunan, has now ruled that the credit was unjust enrichment: money obtained without legal basis must be returned. The judgment put an end to the argument a commenter summarised as "your mistake, so why should I pay it back" — the position Li took while spending.
The online verdicts have split their scorn between the two parties. "His first reaction wasn't to report it, it was to spend," one commentator noted, calling the spending spree indefensible — while adding that the platform's own risk control deserves equal scrutiny, since "one employee's slip of the hand" conjuring quadrillions out of thin air shows a system that barely checked anything. Another called it "the biggest mess a worker has caused in 2026," a reminder of how much damage one wrong field can do.
On Zhihu, where the case drew a wide discussion, commenters debated whether Li bore legal responsibility beyond returning the money. The court's answer so far covers the civil side: return everything. What remains open is the criminal line — at what point spending money you know appeared by mistake stops being greed and starts being a crime, and whether the platform that let a sixteen-digit ID pass as an amount will face any consequence of its own.