Be Careful What You Type

Yesterday was a cut-off deadline for our Catalyst West Coast event in April. As usual, the Catalyst offices were slammed with last minute phone calls and web registrations from people taking advantage of the discounted rates before they went up.

When I got into the office this morning, the first thing I did was to hop onto the West Coast registration page to make sure all the new rates were calculating correctly, etc. for the next registration period. I filled out a test registration and sent it in to make sure.

When I went to our registration management backend to delete my test registration I was greeted by something that literally made me laugh out loud. Someone had inadvertently typed their phone number into the “# of Registrations” box. To make matters worse, their area code began with a “9.” When the registration came through it showed that they had registered for over 900,000,000 registrations at a cost to them of $198,759!

Luckily we don’t employ immediate payment processing (usually happens the next day), so it didn’t actually hit their credit card with that amount. And in reality, it is highly unlikely that they have a credit limit that large that would cover it anyhow.

What is hilarious is that the system sends out a confirmation email after someone registers which includes the number of registrations and charge amount. Someone got to start their day by receiving an email saying their credit card had been charged for nearly $200k!

Just goes to show that you should be careful what you type.

Posted 01.30.2009

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