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A customer paid a hawker S$4,450 instead of S$44.50 after using a digital e-payment platform for the first time.

The incident occurred at around 6:30am on April 6 at the coffee shop at Block 201 Tampines Street 21.

The hawker stall, which got transferred the erroneous sum of money, sells small bites, such as sesame balls and rice dumplings.

It is run by a husband and wife duo, Chen Deming, 58, and Zhang Mingfang, 55.

According to Shin Min, the relatively new stall has only been operating for a month.

What happened

A woman, who appeared to be in her 40s, paid the stall a visit and bought shrimp dumplings, mung bean sesame balls, rice dumplings, and meat dumplings, and spent a total of S$44.50.

At that time, only Zhang was manning the stall by herself.

As the transaction price of S$44.50 was relative large, she checked her mobile phone repeatedly for 5 minutes to ensure that the amount had been credited to her.

To her surprise, she soon realised she received an e-payment amount of S$4,450, which was 100 times the intended payment amount.

However, by the time she understood what happened, the customer was already gone.

Moreover, Zhang was unable to leave her stall unattended to run after the customer as her husband was not around.

Returned 2 hours later

Fortunately, the customer realised her error and returned to the stall two hours later to claim her refund.

She went back to the stall with her husband.

Zhang said: "I happened to be away at that time, so she waited for a while. But I recognised her as soon as I saw her, and she acknowledged me and I refunded her the money quickly."

It is understood that the customer disclosed that it was the first time she used the PayNow transfer service.

Top photo via Shin Min Daily News