Yes, you read that right!
You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000--the list truly goes on and on and on. Now the outrageous bill receivers club has a new member in Daniel DeVirgilio.
Yes, based on the cable bill that DeVirgilio received this week, he's either the king of pay-per-view, or the victim of one of the most extreme computerized billing glitches in the history of computerized billing glitches. Fortunately for him, it looks like it's the latter.
When the Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million.
"All I want to do is watch March Madness," DeVirgilio, whose bill usually runs around $80 a month, told the Dayton Daily News. The paper says DeVirgilio did the math and concluded that he'd have to order 1.6 million on-demand movies or a pay-per-view fight 400,000 times to accumulate $16.4 million in charges. But at least he's maintaining a sense of humor about the whole thing.
"Had I known this I would have bought Showtime," DeVirgilio, an engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told the Daily News. For its part, Time Warner issued a statement apologizing for the error and said that they're "going to work with the customer to get this resolved."
While the dollar amount of DeVirgilio's billing ordeal makes it among the more egregious in recent memory, the kings of all billing mishaps have to be a Texas man and a New Hampshire man in who received quadrillion-dollar credit card bills in 2009.
The former, Jon Seale, received notice that he owed a 17-figure sum that totaled almost 2,000 times the national debt: 23 quadrillion, 148 trillion, 855 billion, 308 million, 184 thousand and 500 dollars. The other, Josh Muszynski, was charged 23 quadrillion after buying a pack of cigarettes at a gas station.