Typos are simply inevitable. I don’t care if you’re Zaila Avant-garde or a regular desk jockey condemned to firing off emails for rent money. At some stage, your finger is going to slip, and a mistaken keystroke will be logged. The only solitary comfort we have is that our typo/typoes (likely) won’t cause us to miss out on cashing in six figures – like the unfortunate individual who accidentally sold his Bored Ape NFT for US$3,000 instead of US$300,000.
For reference, prior to this boo-boo, the cheapest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT you could purchase was priced at 52 ether (US$210,000). The owner of this particular NFT had originally intended to set his price at 75 ether – not 0.75 ether. So you can begin to imagine how much of a bargain this represents to whoever was quick enough on the draw; and with absolutely zero recourse, you can also begin to understand how much of a loss this represents for Max (also known on Twitter as @maxonaut).
“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” Max tells CNET.
“I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly. I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 ETH [US$34,000] of gas fees, so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that… US$250,000 was gone.”
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It does, however, appear as though Max is already picking himself up and dusting himself off. A few days ago, he issued the following statement via social media:
“Sometimes you fuck up, make a bad buy, out of gas fail, send ETH to the wrong wallet, or fat-finger a listing,” he tweets.
“It’s going to happen. But letting it occupy your mind for even one second after you can no longer affect the outcome is purely hurting yourself twice.”
A solid approach to life in general, really.
Outside of your standard Bored Ape NFT sales being torpedoed by a single typo, 2021 has been a year of fat-finger financial fuck ups – with banks being the repeat victims of comparable incidents.
According to CNN, as Revlon’s acting loan agent, Citibank set out to transfer approximately US$8 million worth of interest payments to the cosmetic operation’s lenders. What happened instead? Close to one hundred times the intended amount was sent, including US$175 million to a hedge fund. In total, Citibank had accidentally wired US$900 million to Revlon’s lenders.
While some lenders offered their cooperation in returning the misplaced millions, others did not. Naturally, Citibank wasted no time by filing a lawsuit in an attempt to reclaim the money. Currently, it has still yet to see the remaining half billion from ten investment advisory firms (you can read more about the entire saga here).
Then there was the matter of real estate agent Darren James and his wife – who had a net worth exceeding Ali Baba’s Jack Ma, Charles Koch, and just about any billionaire residing here in Australia for ten whole days. The culprit this time around was Chase Bank, who accidentally deposited US$50 billion (AU$66.5 billion) into their joint account.
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“I’m like, ‘Where did that come from?’” says James.
“And all we were thinking was who’s going to be knocking on our door… because we don’t know anybody with that type of money to begin with.”
“That’s not like a one zero error or a two zero error – that’s somebody that fell asleep on the keyboard error. I was excited for sure. Really surprised how it got there and wondered if I had a rich uncle that gave it to me.”
Four days later, the correct balance was restored. And thankfully for Chase Bank, they didn’t go on a Bitcoin spending spree before disappearing into the wind. All in all, it was an entirely honest and good-natured ordeal.
“My moral compass only goes one way and that’s the correct way,” Darren James tells CNN.
“There’s a big difference between morality and legality. Honesty and good moral character immediately kicked in, we can’t do anything with the money. I didn’t earn it, it’s not ours to spend.”
