Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011; it is a news item from that month, and the events it describes were current then.
Josué Niamehr, the owner of a US business, had heard that one way to make his business more profitable was to invest in advertising, and he specifically chose to advertise his business on Facebook, since its cost per 1,000 impressions is among the lowest on the market.
Once the campaign was under way, Josué received a message along these lines:
There is an outstanding balance of $8,804,978.14, so your ads will not run until the problem is resolved. Enter a payment method so that this amount can be charged.
Josué Niamehr, whose credit card had expired, obviously thought the amount was outrageous, not to mention that he didn’t have that kind of money.
Luckily for Josué, Facebook wrote to tell him it had been a computer error and that all he actually owed was $58.07, not $8 million.
The folks at TechCrunch have worked out that he may have been billed the outstanding balance of every account Facebook has yet to collect on, which gives us an idea of how much the company bills in advertising.
And by the way, Josué is eating well again, breathing easier and over the scare.
Source: TechCrunch
Featured image: Austin McKinley, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
