The Register has this interesting story… a man in Georgia USA received a letter from his bank shortly after he closed his account with them. He believed he had cleared any outstanding charges so was a little bit surprised when he received a letter from the bank insisting he owed them $211 trillion dollars. This is just over 23 times the national debt of the United States (as at 4th Dec 2007).

The letter received by the unfortunate man also informed him that the information regarding his debt would be passed to a credit scoring agency. As this is apparently an automated process the ex-account holder has resigned himself to it appearing on his credit report at some point in the future.

The bank has apologised and has assured the recipient that his details have not been passed on. The bank’s stated root cause for this error was a “word processing error” (how quaint, they seem to still write each individual letter by hand. No mail merge?) and that this was an isolated case.

There is no information whether the poor recipient of this letter has considered suing the bank for the shock and awe that their letter may have caused, or the potential damage to his credit rating if the bank bungles the fix of their bungling.

At $211 trillion dollars this counts as a trainwreck, and is the counterbalance to the story we had a while ago about the Australian man and his uncontrolled overdraft.