Fifty years with us

The mistake

When a customer record's sign-up date is null, the loyalty-badge code backfills it with the earliest date value the system can represent (e.g. the epoch or a database min-date sentinel) instead of leaving it blank or using the account creation date. This makes every account with a missing sign-up date appear to be decades old, which then feeds into a downstream loyalty-milestone job that fires real rewards based on that fabricated tenure. With no validation that the backfilled date is plausible relative to the company's actual founding date, the milestone job mass-triggers a fifty-year reward for ~400,000 accounts at a company only ten years old.