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A Nottingham business owner has become the richest person in the history of the world in theory but there's a catch. Sophie Downing, a 29-year-old from who runs the Secret Sugar Club, a hair removal service, walked into the 200 Degrees Coffee shop in Nottingham expecting nothing more than a standard hot drink paid for with a £10 gift card. Instead, she walked out with a receipt suggesting she was sitting on more money than anyone in human history, at least on paper.

The confusion began when Ms Downing used her gift card to buy a matcha latte. When the transaction went through, the till unexpectedly displayed a remaining balance of more than £63 quadrillion - a figure so large it dwarfs global economic estimates and would theoretically make her vastly richer than any billionaire on Earth.

The supposed balance made her about 100,000 times wealthier than centibillionaire Elon Musk. However, the extraordinary figure wasn't real money at all.

Staff later explained it was caused by a simple administrative mix-up. The system had mistakenly treated the gift card number as its monetary value, generating an absurdly inflated balance on the receipt.

Despite the surreal number, the business owner took the situation in good humour. She even joked about enjoying her brief status as the "richest person in the world on paper," though she added she had no intention of trying to spend anything beyond her actual balance.

Ms Downing told NottinghamshireLive at the time: "I thought it was really funny. I've never seen anything like that before.

"The guy at the till was really confused. His face was just like 'what?'

"This massive number came up on the till. He said 'I've never seen it before but it's fine for you to keep it'.

"I didn't clock it until he gave me the receipt. I thought 'surely not, that's actually crazy'."

She added: "Maybe they have scanned the wrong thing. It looks as though they have scanned the barcode which has turned into the balance."

A spokesperson for 200 Degrees has since confirmed the error, clarifying that no extra funds were ever loaded onto the card and that the customer was only ever charged correctly. The inflated figure, they said, was purely a technical glitch that ended up printed on a receipt rather than reflecting real value.

The spokesperson said: "Due to a technical administrative error, the gift card number, rather than the gift card value was entered into the wrong part of the till.

"As a result, the customer was generated a receipt which suggested they had a rather higher amount of money left on their gift card than they actually did.

"The customer was only charged exactly what they should have been, and after they had completed their purchase, their gift card had exactly the right amount left on it, they just had a receipt which showed a very different amount, which the barista gave them as a souvenir.

"They were then given a correct receipt which showed the true value of the gift card."