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Oops! PayPal, the online money- transfer company, has accidentally credited a man in Delaware a whopping $92,233,720,368,547,800, making him by far the richest man in the world.
Chris Reynolds, 56, said he was shocked when he received his monthly statement via e-mail from PayPal last week, with an ending balance of $92 quadrillion, over a million times richer than the world's richest man, Carlos Slim.
The fortune of Slim, a Mexican telecommunications mogul, would pale in comparison at a mere $73 billion.
'I'm just feeling like a million bucks,' Reynolds was quoted as saying by the Philadelphia Daily News. 'At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.'
Reynolds said he has been a PayPal customer for about 10 years and uses it to buy and sell items on eBay, including vintage car parts. He said he usually spends no more than $100 a month using PayPal.
After absorbing the initial shock, Reynolds logged on to PayPal's site and saw that his balance was listed there as $0.
If the prodigious account credit were true, Reynolds - who with his wife owns Reynolds Ink, a public-relations firm - said he would pay down debts with the money.
'I'm a very responsible guy,' he said. 'I would pay the national debt down first.'
PayPal has admitted the error and offered to donate an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds' choice.
'This is obviously an error and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understood this was the case,' CNN quoted PayPal as saying in a statement.
