Sometimes you make a spelling mistake in an important email and spend the rest of the day wishing you could take it back. Whether it’s an email to a potential hiring manager or potential date, it can be embarrassing, making you wish you could take the email back. Here’s a story that will make you feel a little better about your own public spelling mistakes: last month a spelling mistake in bank hackers’ instructions to transfer funds cost them almost $1 billion dollars.

This past February hackers successfully broke into the central bank of Bangladesh. They stole account credentials for payment transfers then targeted the bank’s account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They started funneling money from the Bangladesh Bank’s accounts to their own accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. 

After transferring $80 million they attempted to transfer another $20 million to a Sri Lankan non-profit organization. Unfortunately, they misspelled the name of the probably fraudulent Shalika Foundation as Shalika “fandation.” This prompted one of the intermediary banks to notify the Bangladesh central bank of this unauthorized transaction, as they sought clarification of the spelling error. According to Reuters, “Bangladesh Bank has billions of dollars in a current account with the Fed, which it uses for international settlements. The transactions that were stopped totaled $850-$870 million, one of the officials said.”

According to the aforementioned Reuters article, the Bangladesh Bank has recovered a portion of the money that was transferred out of their account and is currently working with authorities to recover the rest. While the hackers managed to retrieve $80 million they missed out on the additional $850 million due to misspelling a single word.