Pennsylvania man became the richest person in world for 2 minutes after PayPal credited him $92 quadrillion

How would you feel if you suddenly became the owner of $92 quadrillion? There's a good chance that you will look for the catch, and yes there's one. A man became the world's wealthiest individual, amassing a fortune that surpassed the entire global GDP by a thousandfold, only it lasted a few minutes. 

Back in 2013, PayPal mistakenly credited Chris Reynolds, a resident of Pennsylvania, with a staggering sum of $92 quadrillion. It didn't take long for the online money-transfer company to rectify the error. However, Reynolds got to be the world's richest person officially, besides being the sole quadrillionaire on the planet.

He was just an ordinary man going about his day when he checked his PayPal account balance and shocked to find $92,233,720,368,547,800 in it. 

Upon realizing the mistake, PayPal withdrew the credited funds and also extended an offer to donate to a charitable organization of Reynolds' choosing as a gesture of goodwill. Later, while talking to Philadelphia Daily News, Reynolds expressed his shock, adding that he sure did feel like a "million bucks."  

He told the news outlet, "At first I thought that I owned quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise." He also talked about what he would have done if he had so much money. "I probably would have paid down the national debt," he said. The news garnered a lot of attention and speculation at the time. People started looking into the technological glitch that had caused this mistake.

"It’s a curious thing," "I don’t know, maybe someone was having fun," he said in a conversation with CNN. Later investigations revealed that the glitch stemmed from an integer overflow issue in PayPal’s system. While the idea of being the world's richest sounds exhilarating, Reynolds soon realized that this was all a huge mistake and had no intentions of keeping the windfall. 

Paypal later released a statement saying, "This is an error and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understood this was the case. We think it's inspiring that he decided to use this occurrence to donate to a cause he believes in. And we hope to honor this spirit by donating to a cause of his choice – we've reached out to him to make this offer and to let him know we are grateful that he's a customer!"

Something similar happened to Darren James and his family who became billionaires after $50 billion got mistakenly deposited into their Chase Bank account. "That’s not like a one zero error or a two zero error, that’s somebody that fell asleep on the keyboard error," James joked, via CNN, adding that it was "exciting" to see such a high bank balance.

"We’re still trying to figure out what happened, why it happened, how it happened, but we know we aren’t the only ones this happened to," he said.

These errors are not happy news even if it initially seems like so. People who spend the money have to return the funds and they can be charged with crimes if they fail to do so. For example, a couple from Pennsylvania was charged with felony theft after they got $120,000 in their bank account and decided to spend it instead of contacting the bank, via CNN.