15 Typos That Cost Companies Millions Of Dollars

• How much can a single person lose in the stock market?
What does Google make from URL spelling errors?
Here are 15 typos that cost companies millions of dollars.
15 – Alitalia Airlines • In 2006, Italian airline ‘Alitalia’
accidentally offered travellers an incredible flight deal when it put business class tickets
from Toronto to Cyprus on sale for just $39.
• They were supposed to be listed for the reasonable price of $3,900.
• Around two thousand customers took advantage of the deal before the airline could do anything
about it.
• Eventually Alitalia gave in and let everyone keep their tickets, but it cost them $7.2
million dollars in the process - and some bad publicity.
14 - The US Tariff Act of 1872 • In 1872 the US Tariff act listed things
that were free from import tax.
One of the items was meant to be “tropical fruit-plants” – instead it read “tropical
fruit, (comma) plants…”
• This one tiny error meant that people were allowed to bring in all fruit without
paying any tariffs.
• The US Treasury had to pay back all the money that had been charged until they could
fix the mistake, two years later.
• The clerk who used the comma cost the government $2 million, which is around $40
million in today’s money.
13 – New York City Department of Education • The Comptroller at the New York City Department
of Education ended up costing his city an extra $1.4 million dollars.
• He was originally given $1.4 million for the transportation budget, but accidentally
doubled the transfer.
• Because of a spelling error, the system couldn’t recognise the mistake and the city
had to put up the rest of the money.
12 – Rogers Communications vs. Bell Aliant • Two Canadian companies got into a legal
dispute all because of the placement of a comma in their contract.
• The cable company ‘Rogers Communications’ had a deal with ‘Bell Aliant’ to use their
telephone poles for five years minimum.
• Bell then decided to cancel the contract after a year because, they argued, the incorrect
use of a comma meant that could cancel any time, with a years notice.
• This cost Rogers 1 million Canadian dollars, until the decision was overturned when they
reviewed the French version of the contract.
11 – Taylor and Sons • One “S” meant that a 124 year-old
Welsh company went out of business for no reason, costing 250 people their jobs.
• In 2009 a government agency in Wales was meant to report that “Taylor and Son”,
with no “s”, had gone out of business.
• Instead, they incorrectly used the plural, and so clients of engineering firm Taylor
and Sons, a completely different company, thought they were closing.
• Even though the owner couldn’t do much to stop business from drying up, he later
successfully sued for 8.8 million pounds in damages.
10 – Honda dealership • In Roswell, New Mexico – yes the place
where aliens didn’t really crash – a Honda dealership and their ad agency made a mistake
that almost cost them $30 million dollars.
• In order to drum up business, they decided to mail out scratch tickets – 30,000 of
them, with one of the tickets winning the “grand prize” of $1000.
• Due to a printing error, every ticket mailed out won the grand prize.
• Since they couldn’t afford to pay everyone, they offered a $5 Wall-Mart gift card and
entry into a draw to win $5000.
9 – State of Hawaii • The state of Hawaii was dealing with a
deficit problem approaching $1 billion dollars in 2009.
• They would have been somewhat relieved when a surplus of $8 million was reported.
However this was down to a clerical error.
• A tax program was counted twice; accidentally reporting $44 million more than they actually
received.
• So in the end the state was a further $36 million dollars in deficit.
8 – Mint of Chile • Back in 2008 the mint of Chile issued
a 50-pesos coin – worth about 10 cents in America – that embarrassingly misspelled
the name of their own country.
• Instead of C-H-I-L-E, it was spelled C-H-I-I-E, but nobody at the mint noticed.
The mistake was finally picked up a year later and the manger was fired.
• Thousands of the coins were made and the government kept them in circulation anyway.
Although, after the mistake became public, people starting collecting them, hoping the
error would increase their value.
7 – Bank of Kazakhstan • Right around the time that Sacha Baron
Cohen was making fun of Kazakhstan, their national bank made his job a whole lot easier
by misspelling brand new bank notes.
• The new 2,000 and 5,000 tenge notes misspelled the letter “k” in “bank” using an
alternate Kazakh version that was different from the other letters on the note.
• The misspelled notes were corrected and the old ones are no longer valid.
• Language is important in Kazakhstan.
Since they gained independence from Russia in 1991 their native language is a source
of pride.
6 – Yellow Pages • In 1988, an unfortunate and comical printing
error in the Yellow pages cost the small California Travel agency, Banner Travel Services, eighty
per cent of their business.
• The agency offered “Exotic travel” to its mainly elderly clients, but when the
ad was printed it read “erotic travel…”
• Instead of calls from her usual clients looking to take a trip to the Amazon, she
was receiving all kinds of requests for a very different kind of getaway.
• As a result of the error, which caused more than just financial problems, the owner
sued the Yellow Pages for more than $10 million.
5 – Lockheed Martin • Aerospace company ‘Lockheed Martin’,
manufacturer of weapons and military aircraft probably isn’t going out of business any
time soon.
• This is despite loosing $70 million in a deal to build aircraft for an unnamed air
force.
• When they made the deal, the prices of the airplanes were supposed to increase each
year with inflation.
However, a misplaced comma in the contract meant they were getting far less interest
than they were supposed to.
• The air force that ordered the jets would not let them correct the mistake, forcing
Lockheed to lose out on its potential profits.
4 – Codelco Company • Back to Chile again, and another blunder
that cost the government – this time totalling $206 million.
• In the early 90s, stock trader Juan Pablo Davila, made a typo that meant he bought $30
million dollars in shares instead of selling them.
• Rather than accepting the loss, he made $1.9 billion worth of trades in the next six
months to reverse his mistake.
• Eventually Davila was caught out and spent three years in prison.
He now has his own verb in Spanish meaning to really screw things up.
3 - Mizuho • One of the costliest mistakes ever made
was by a division of the second largest bank in Japan.
It was another stock market blunder, caused by “fat finger syndrome”.
• Mizuho Financial Group was supposed to sell shares of recruitment company J-Com at
610,000 Yen a share – over 5000 US dollars.
• Instead, 610,000 shares were sold at 1 Yen a piece - less than a penny.
• The Tokyo stock exchange wouldn’t cancel the trade, and it cost Mizuho Financial Group
$340 million dollars.
2 - Google • Sometimes though, typos can pay – for
Google at least.
The company is thought to earn $497 million dollars a years through what are known as
“typosquatting” sites.
• These are domain names that use common misspellings of some of the top sites on the
Internet.
• It is estimated that 0.7 per cent of domain searches are typos, which totals over 68 million
page views.
• Most of these domain-parking sites are there to just display advertising.
Since Google runs most of the ads – about 60 per cent – they end up profiting.
1 - NASA • In 1962, during the space race with the
Soviet Union, NASA was planning its first interplanetary space mission.
The un-manned ‘Mariner 1’ probe was destined to fly by Venus to collect data.
• A typo in the calculations meant that the guidance system was thrown off, and the
probe had to be blown up 293 seconds after it launched.
• Explanations range from a mathematical transcription error to a missing hyphen.
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke called it “the most expensive hyphen in history”.
Missing hyphen or not, it still cost NASA $80 million dollars.
• Despite the loos, the ‘Marnier 2’ ended up completing the mission later that
year.

15 Typos That Cost Companies Millions Of Dollars

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