Espionage steal credit backfires?

[Gonus]

Spies can steal credits and the amount is supposed to be random between 0 to maximum of all credits in the target player's reserve. I've been stealing negative credits on occasion. At first I thought okay, that's a bug and it should just give me no credits, but after paying closer attention, whenever I "steal" negative credits, my own credit reserve is deducted from and given to the opponent!

I'm sure about the credit deduction but I'm not sure about how and when the negative credit stealing situation happens. So far, I've only had this issue against Noxium Corporation. Also, it was on a city that at one point I had reduced to zero population by using a spy's genetic virus and that odd 0 population situation itself may be causing this bug. My working hypothesis is that if the target city is already operating at a deficit that somehow that affects the steal credit function but I really don't know what's going on and I'm looking for other players input to help the dev team out when patching.