Users acquire free bitcoins due to an error in the Japanese exchange Zaif.

Some customers of the Japanese exchange Zaif had the opportunity to buy bitcoins for a value of 0 dollars last week thanks to an error in the system. The company is recovering them.

Zaif, a Japanese bitcoin exchange run by Tech Bureau Corp, has revealed that it had a brief error in the system that allowed customers to trade cryptocurrencies for the incredible price of 0 yen. The problem, which affected Zaif's pricing system, lasted 18 minutes going from 5:40 pm to 5:58 pm local time on February 16.

The company announced on Tuesday that seven users made purchases during this period of time. A particularly ambitious trader apparently even tried to buy a bitcoin worth 2,200 trillion yen (about 20 trillion dollars) during the ruling and then quickly tried to collect it, according to a report by the second most popular national newspaper in Japan, Asahi Shimbun.

According to reports, the problem was solved at 7:34 p.m. the same day. An official from the Technology Office also apologized to investors for the problems and promised to take measures to avoid additional failures.

After the error was discovered in the system and the immense error was made clear, Tech Bureau subsequently invalidated the zero cost transactions and returned the users' balances to their previous states on the platform. However, he was still trying to solve the problem with a client who tried to transfer the bitcoins out of the stock market, a company spokesperson told Reuters.

Tech Bureau Corp. is now subject to an investigation by the Financial Services Agency (FSA) on system security and other business practices. Its Zaif platform is one of the sixteen exhanges that were already licensed to offer services in the country by the government and was one of the original eleven that the FSA approved for the first time in September of last year. The regulator recently announced that it is inspecting 32 exchanges of cryptocurrencies, including 16 that have not yet obtained a license, but are currently in process.