Special Correspondent LoLo, Esq., has been fixated on CNBC and giving me play-by-play during this blackest of Black Thursdays, and tells me that “trader error” is now being cited as a reason for this afternoon’s massive fail:

So, take this for what you will: CNBC is reporting that “a possible culprit” for the huge drop in stock prices this afternoon “was a trader error in which someone entered a ‘b’ for billion instead of an ‘m’ for million in a trade.”

The cable network said on its Web site that “multiple sources confirmed the report to CNBC and CNBC.com.”

In some reports, the trade in question is Procter and Gamble, $PG, which dropped $20 out of nowhere when this all went down. In other reports it was a massive block of e-minis (S&P futures contracts traded on the CME). LoLo also tells me which bank was implicated: $C! Yeah, Citigroup.

BANDITRY!

In all honesty, if this is for real… if I were the one who made the oopsie in question, I would definitely have already put on a bandit mask, and would be in a town car on my way to the airport to get the heck out of Dodge as fast as I possibly could.