Skyrim player begs for help after their Speech apparently drops to -100K, making bribes cost 20 million gold: "I think I would fail the Whiterun guard letting me into the city"

gamesradar.com:

Folks, we may have found the least persuasive Dragonborn in the history of Skyrim. Reddit user NoAdministration1070, who claims that no extraneous mods or exploits were used in their Xbox One version of the RPG, reportedly found that their character's Speech stat had abruptly plummeted to -100,000, effectively ruling out persuasion tactics by making things like bribes cost millions of gold. If their story is true, this Dragonborn couldn't sell water to a fish, and according to them, the inexplicable drop in charm came out of nowhere. 

"Help please," our hero pleaded in a Reddit post that's found remarkable traction amongst the Skyrim community, sitting at 14,000 upvotes and climbing. In an interview with GamesRadar+, NoAdministration1070 adds that they noticed this little error just under 46 hours into their playthrough. 

I had three theories when this post first came up. Well, technically four, but for the moment I'm going to ignore the possibility that this is all a hoax. One, maybe this is the result of a mod gone wrong? But NoAdministration1070 says no mods were used beyond the well-known Unofficial Skyrim Patch that cleans up a wide range of issues. 

Two, it could be the result of some weird integer overflow caused by a skill that was over-trained through XP exploits, or perhaps mistakenly tabulated in the background. A clean -100,000 would be an odd result if that was the case, but I've learned to expect the unexpected from Bethesda game engines. NoAdministration1070 insists they didn't knowingly get into any funny business, though an unintended interaction of this nature still seems like the most probable explanation to me.   

Lastly, this could be the effect of an enchantment exploit. As many Skyrim players pointed out in the comments on the original post, you can glitch your way into game-breaking equipment with absurd bonuses that, when removed, can bring on whiplash like a car crash. We've seen such accessories drop a player's health into the negatives