‘The most expensive email ever’: Idiot Brit screws up and sends email that costs the government $8 billion

We’ve all had bad days at work. You might have dropped a toner cartridge on the floor and made a huge mess, perhaps something expensive was stolen while you were on watch, or you clicked the wrong button and accidentally deleted an important file. Well, be assured that whatever you do will not be as bad as what this anonymous Brit did.

The unknown individual (and he should pray he stays anonymous) was a Royal Marine based at their Special Forces HQ in London, whose job was to verify applications by Afghans who’d assisted the British forces in the country and who now wanted to move to the United Kingdom. Given that Afghanistan is once again under Taliban control, these guides, translators, etc, are in danger of revenge attacks for collaborating.

In Feb. 2022, apparently working outside authorized government systems, he sent what he believed was a list of 150 names to some of his contacts. Unfortunately, what he actually sent were the full details of all 18,800 applicants, which included 33,000 lines of data, including their family members, phone numbers, and addresses. Whoopsy-do!

Single Royal Marine costs nation £6bn by accidentally attaching spreadsheet listing all Afghan asylum seekers who worked for Uk to email intercepted by Taliban. And previous government buried it under a super injunction! https://t.co/K3aGS87yXm

— Paul Nuki 🦋 (@PaulNuki) July 15, 2025

All too soon the list was in the wild, with a horrified activist spotting discussion of it online and contacting the Ministry of Defence to say: “The Taliban may now have a 33,000-long kill list – essentially provided to them by the British government. If any of these families are murdered, the government will be liable.”

“Uh, boss, I’ve made a teeeeeeeny oopsie.”

Panic immediately set in at the highest levels of the British government, and those most at risk were notified. It launched a top-secret program called “Operation Rubific” to bring those most at risk of assassination into the United Kingdom as quickly as possible. Then they began censoring all talk of the list, with a British judge granting a superinjunction “against the world” banning all discussion of the leak.

The British government then began a covert scheme to evacuate those affected to the United Kingdom. So far, 56,100 Afghans have been resettled, with the total cost being estimated at around £6 billion (around $8 billion). That’s one expensive email!

When the Royal Marine in the office asks if anyone should be cc’d in on the email, and you tell him to use his common sense… pic.twitter.com/8M0xpq7npm

— ShipWrekt (@ShipWrektPod) July 15, 2025

So, the next time you feel bad about accidentally cc-ing the wrong person at work or inadvertently hitting “reply all”, be assured that no matter how much chaos you’ve caused, you’re not coming close to what this hapless Brit did on what has to be the most expensive email mistake in human history!