Here are a few of the most expensive mistakes that people have made!
11 - Oops Sorry In 2015, a Taiwanese kid had what is probably
the most expensive fall in art history.
While visiting a gallery, he tripped and accidentally punched a hole straight through a painting
valued at 1.3 million dollars.
The security footage shows the 12-year-old boy stumbling into the rope barrier protecting
the paintings.
He tried to catch his balance but put his hand clean through the 17th-century oil painting.
The painting, called Flowers, was done by famous Italian artist Paolo Porpora.
Experts restored it in Taiwan before sending it back to Italy.
Luckily for the kid and his parents, the painting was insured, and the gallery had them cover
the cost of fixing the image and compensating the actual owner.
If that hadn't worked out, the poor kid probably would have been working to pay it off until
he retired!
10 - Spanish Sub In 2013, the Spanish navy made a small but
expensive math error.
Their new submarine was 70 tons too heavy, and if it went underwater, it would never
come back up.
An investigation revealed that someone put a single decimal point in the wrong place.
The situation was even worse because the submarine was almost completed when they noticed the
error.
Because of that misplaced decimal point, they had to pay a U.S. Navy contractor $14 million
to solve the problem.
The most likely solution to the issue was to extend the length of the hull to increase
the buoyancy.
Still, there's no easy way to compensate for an additional 70 tons of weight.
We're positive whoever messed up that decimal point got fired and possibly sent back to
math 101.
9 - Whiskey Water One night in 2013, a Chivas Brothers bottling
plant accidentally lost thousands of liters of whisky.
It was undoubtedly the most expensive mix-up in the company's history.
While cleaning some equipment, the workers accidentally flushed a massive amount of whisky
down the drain instead of wastewater.
Clearly, the two switches for this shouldn't be anywhere near each other.
The stench of that much booze going into the drainage system created a smell that was so
intense that workers at the local sewage plant reported it.
Unfortunately, you couldn't turn on your faucet and get free whiskey.
Chivas Brothers lost a lot of money, and several water treatment employees worked overtime
to deal with this sudden influx of whiskey in the water.
8 - One Number Off Detroit's demolition department suspended
its most prominent contractor after they tore down the wrong house in 2019.
Everyone makes mistakes, even people whose job is to tear down houses.
But this wasn't their first oversight.
In fact, it was the second "wrong house" they'd torn down in 18 months.
This wasn't some small-time construction company operating out somebody's pickup truck.
They were the Adamo Group, and Detroit awarded them more than $58 million worth of demolition
contracts in their history.
They were supposed to demolish a fire-damaged house at 14461 Alma street.
Instead, They demolished 14661 Alma street, which was perfectly fine.
A one-number difference resulted in a random building getting destroyed for no reason.
An independent auditor tried to shine a light on Detroit's mismanaged demolitions department.
They claimed the department had been littered with severe problems for the past four years.
Of course, city officials chose to ignore that report.
Both houses happened to be owned by the same bank and were only one block apart.
The Adamo Group decided not to tell the bank about the accident for a week—possibly out
of embarrassment—which is understandable.
We imagine it's not easy to tell someone you accidentally deleted their house.
7 - Wrongful Release
Rene Lima-Marin was serving a 98-year prison sentence for robbing two video rental stores
in 1998.
Luckily for him, he was accidentally released in 2008.
A 10-year sentence is still a lot, but it's nothing compared to the century-long sentence
he faced.
It was the luckiest day of his life, maybe of anybody's life.
However, his luck ran out when the prison realized the mistake they had made and arrested
him again six years later in 2014.
But then his luck returned.
The judge wrote a 165-page letter basically saying it would be utterly unjust to compel
Marin to serve the rest of his extremely long sentence.
So why did the court let him off the hook?
Weren't they the same people who said he needed 100 years for robbing Blockbuster?
During his six years of freedom, Miran became an upstanding member of society.
He got a job, got married, had two kids, and bought a house.
He even worked with at-risk kids to encourage them to stay away from crime.
Marin did a speed run of the American dream in 6 years, and the judge decided that throwing
him back in prison would be a crime in and of itself.
So how did Marin get out in the first place?
Someone accidentally wrote that his multiple sentences were served simultaneously, not
one after the other.
The difference between the words concurrent and consecutive gave Marin a new lease on
life.
While this mistake wasn't expensive, it could have gone entirely differently.
Marin could have gone on to keep robbing stores or worse.
Thankfully, he turned a new leaf, and it all worked out in the end.
6 - Last Banksy An iconic art piece by Banksy, a street artist
known for public paintings of questionable legality, was accidentally destroyed in Melbourne,
Australia, in 2012.
It was one of the last Banksy pieces left in the country.
While building a new cafe, workers accidentally drilled directly through it while creating
a hole for the plumbing.
The wall painting depicted a parachuting rat, a political cartoon in-line with Banksy's
satirical style.
Banksy's identity remains a mystery to this day.
All that's known about him is his British descent and anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments.
He's been active since the 1990s and was commissioned to design the cover of Blur's ThinkTank.
You may remember Banksy as the artist who sold Girl With Balloon for $1.4 million and
then triggered a secret shredding mechanism hidden in the frame to destroy the picture.
Local businesses weren't happy about the pulping accident, as the Banksy graffiti brought people
to the area.
They explained their woes to the news at the time, saying that had the rat been 20 centimeters
higher and to the left, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
5 - Shattered Art Critic Avelina Lesper was known for her
scathing critiques of modern art.
Like many people, she considered it uninteresting and wasn't afraid to voice this opinion in
art circles.
This made it slightly suspicious when she destroyed a piece of modern art in a gallery
in 2020.
The piece, which was essentially a pane of glass with objects stuck in it, shattered
to pieces when Lesper happened to set down a can of soda near it.
She denied intentionally doing anything wrong and apologized for the accident.
Before it shattered, she had told other people at the gallery that she didn't like it.
To add insult to injury, she maintained that she'd never liked the piece and continued
to insult it after its destruction.
In fact, she said it was like the work heard her comment and threw itself off the display.
The piece was valued at 20 thousand dollars before it exploded into thousands of pieces.
4 - Too Wide In 2014, the French train operator SNCF found
out that the 2,000 new trains they ordered were too wide for most of their platforms.
The trains, which cost 20 billion dollars, didn't fit in the station, and that 20 billion
was just the beginning of their costly headaches.
Rather than ordering 2,000 slimmer trains, France just made the station platforms bigger.
That means they had to adjust over 1,000 platforms!
The error occurred because the national rail operator gave the wrong dimensions to the
train company.
Someone put the wrong number in an email somewhere along the line, and it cost France 20 billion
dollars.
3 - Catastrophic Loss On January 16th, 1995, Nick Leeson placed
a short straddle in the Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges.
His bid wouldn't have been that big of a deal, except he was using his company's money without
telling them.
At the time, he worked for Barings Bank, the oldest bank in England.
They'd sent him out to Singapore to oversee their new offices but had no idea what sort
of games he was playing with their money.
Nick bet that the Japanese stock market wouldn't move too much overnight.
He wasn't supposed to be doing this, legally speaking, but he wasn't the type to care about
technicalities.
Unfortunately, the Kobe earthquake hit that night, sending the market into a wild crash,
ultimately toppling Leeson's plan.
He made a series of increasingly risky bets to try and get the money back before anyone
noticed, but these also failed.
Barings Bank collapsed after losing $1.4 billion to Leeson's risky play.
He left a note in an empty vault that read "I'm sorry" and fled the country.
The banking fugitive ran from the law for a while, moving to Malaysia, Thailand, and
Germany.
But he was eventually arrested and imprisoned.
However, Leeson's story goes far deeper than a few bad bets.
Check out this full video to learn how Nick Leeson basically hid all his mistakes in an
"oops" account!
2 - Grandma's Money A freezer is a great place for things such
as ice cream and popsicles.
But it's not a good place for envelopes full of cash— $25,000 in cash.
One grandmother didn't get that memo and must have confused the freezer with the bank.
Talk about freezing your bank account!
Her family was cleaning her freezer when they stumbled across an envelope and threw it out.
Nobody thought to look inside or question why there was an envelope in the freezer.
Perhaps they chalked it up to grandma being a confused old lady?
Luckily for them, grandma called and asked if they had found the envelope.
Even luckier, the garbage truck hadn't made it to the landfill yet.
The family called the trash company and thankfully got it back.
Had they waited any longer, they'd be digging through the dump searching for that $25,000
envelope.
1 - Desk Cleaning James Howells was cleaning up the office in
2013 when he threw out a hard drive that he didn't think he was using.
It turns out it was being used for things—a lot of things.
The hard drive had over hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin on it!
Howells got into Bitcoin on the ground floor as one of the first people to start mining
the cryptocurrency.
Back then, the sentiment was "what a waste of money!"
He built up a heavy crypto wallet before his family's needs outweighed his love for crypto.
He downloaded his bitcoin onto a hard drive and forgot about it.
That hard drive is now sitting in a landfill in Newport, South Wales, covered by thousands
of pounds of garbage.
Due to bureaucratic red tape, Howells has been unable to go into the dump and try to
find his hard drive.
He even tried offering the government a share of the money, but they turned him down.
Howells hasn't given up because there's $400 million on the line here.
He's contacted engineers, environmentalists, and data recovery experts from all over the
world to try and help him with his campaign.
All the man wants to do is dig through some garbage!
He even got in touch with the people at NASA who worked on the Columbia shuttle disaster.
This is only scratching the surface of Howells' crazy crypto story.
Check out this feature-length video to learn more about his dumpster-diving escapades.
Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section would you rather have a billion dollars and be 70
or have zero dollars and be 18?