Oh... My... God...
So apparently yesterday this rumor was circulating on TikTok and Twitter across dozens of accounts that you could "hack" the ATMs at Chase Bank and pull out significant sums of money (one example being $30k). Turns out it wasn't so much of a glitch as it was... you know... felony fraud. Go figure.
New York Times
Experts say the “glitch” videos look an awful lot like check fraud — one of the oldest scams in the book.
Videos urging customers at the bank to take advantage of the “glitch” quickly took off online, prompting people to deposit fake checks for large sums of money. The glitch would credit some of the sham deposits to the customers’ accounts before the checks cleared.
Is this even a glitch at all?
Chase Bank, in all their wisdom, seemed to be purposefully giving their clients a line of credit on deposited checks. This allows for a better UX as clients can then withdraw or transfer their own money instantly rather than having to wait for the check to clear. However, what were they thinking in allowing these lines of credit to be so massive? I could see allowing a couple thousand dollars... Venmo does the exact same thing. But $30k? $40k? What's going on here?
https://x.com/Osint613/status/1830212715379327386
If we watch the videos of people celebrating their "free money" it's very obvious they have absolutely no idea they've done anything wrong... let alone a felony crime. This truly is a failure on multiple fronts. Nobody understands how the money works by design. People have it in their heads that if no one is stopping them from doing something then it's okay to do it. It's crazy to see something like this go viral out of control like a wildfire.
At the same time it's also just depressing that people see something like $30k as a "life changing" amount; While at the same time also apparently spending that amount in a single day; finding themselves unable to pay back the money they stole. How did so many people think it was okay to do this? Ah well the Internet said so, and deep down these people subconsciously know that money is completely fake and it gets printed out of thin air, so why not?
https://x.com/JoshyBeSloshy/status/1829909409025388583
Newsweek:
Under the surface there seems to be a lot more to this story. The first thing that a lot of news reports seem to ignoring is that Chase was also allowing some of these people to take out huge loans and instant withdrawals; something that never should have been allowed in the first place. Others still have been warning citizens to make sure to close out their ATM session immediately so that the person behind you can't perform operations using your credentials. Others still are saying this viral event could of happened as a smokescreen: The 'legitimate' scammers could have tried to obfuscate their own illegal activity by tricking so many others into performing the same type of action as law enforcement got wise to it.
https://x.com/scubaryan_/status/1829932871664181596
Some people noted that the glitch was actually just check fraud and that those who had filmed and posted themselves doing or attempting it on social media could face serious repercussions.
"The internet is amazing," one person wrote on X.
"Never deleting this app"
Perhaps this is all just indicative of how broken the world is at the moment. Life is so unfair and lacking opportunity that people interpret literal theft as some kind of objectively fair "infinite money glitch" with zero ramifications. As technology continues to propel wealth to the upper-upper class we should expect this type of mentality to escalate; A sad but true state of affairs.