Most consumers have relatively low opinion of the customer service that they receive from banks, but nobody is as unhappy about the service they receive as Dalton Chiscolm.
Chiscolm, a New York resident, decided Bank of America and its board because of the poor customer service he claimed to have received. In his suit, Chiscolm demanded that “1,784 billion, trillion dollars be deposited into his account. That’s the equivalent of 1.784 sextillion dollars, which is equivalent to $1,784,000,000, 000,000,000,000. Court papers showed that Chisolm also demanded an additional $200,164,000.
All attempts from the media to reach Chiscolm have been unsuccessful to this point and Bank of America has declined to comment about the case.
Judge Chin does have some experience dealing with large numbers. In fact, it was Chin that sentence Bernie Madoff to a 150 year prison sentence for running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. However, Chin, or any other judge for that matter, has never presided over a case that that involved 22 digits. In fact the amount that Chiscolm is asking for is about 29.7 million times the total gross domestic product each year that the World Bank estimates as about $60 trillion.
Sylvain Cappel, a professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences commented on the case, “These are the kind of numbers you deal with only on a cosmic scale. Cappel Continued, “If he thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense.”
Judge Chin gave Chiscolm until October 23rd to provide a better explanation for the basis of his claims, or else face a dismissal of his complaint.
Although Bank of America will likely win on a summary judgment in this case, Bank of America does face some significant legal problems, including a threat of a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the embarrassing rejection of a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Bank of America has to get in order.
