He received $3 trillion in compensation, and the surprise in his reaction

Northern PowerGrid gave Gareth Hughes a check for $3 trillion and $145 million in compensation for the outages caused by Storm Irwin.

And according to the British newspaper, The Sun, Hughes from Yorkshire spent three days without electricity last November.

After Hughes received the astronomical-numbered check, he took to Twitter and asked the company if it was wrong in the compensation it sent him.

Hughes wrote on Twitter: “Are you sure of the amount sent to me in compensation? I know that four of my neighbors also received large sums of compensation for the blackout.”

In response to Hughes’ post, Northern PowerGrid announced that it had made a clerical error and had ordered banks to withhold cash from 74 large erroneous compensation checks.

A spokesperson for the Electricity Distribution Company said: “Once we identified the clerical error that resulted from incorrectly stating the electricity meter reference number as a compensation amount, we made sure that all 74 customer checks were stopped.”

“We thank the customers who were honest and contacted us to report this error. We had direct calls over the weekend with all 74 affected customers to inform them, apologize for the error and assure them that a valid compensation payment will be issued to them soon.”