close
close

first Drop

Com TW NOw News 2024

Viral ‘Chase Bank ATM Glitch’ Promised People Free Money — But Left Them With Thousands In Debt And A Chance Of Jail Time
news

Viral ‘Chase Bank ATM Glitch’ Promised People Free Money — But Left Them With Thousands In Debt And A Chance Of Jail Time

In a not-so-shocking development, a viral TikTok trend once again turned out to be nothing more than a dumb stunt that ruined the lives of impressionable people.

The trend involved people taking advantage of a glitch at JPMorgan Chase ATMs, allowing users to deposit a check — without having the funds available — and immediately access the money in it.

This is check fraud, but was shared on TikTok as a fun way to get free money.

In reality, Chase did have a glitch that allowed the ATMs to be abused, but the company fixed the problem within days of discovering it, according to a representative who worked with the New York Post.

“We are aware of this incident and it has been addressed. Regardless of what you see online, depositing a fraudulent check and withdrawing the funds from your account is fraud, pure and simple,” the spokesperson said.

Before the repairs, some social media users shared videos of themselves withdrawing money from ATMs and celebrating. Some customers were filmed “making it rain” with their ill-gotten gains outside a Yonkers Chase Bank ATM.

Later in the video, the customers were seen hanging out of their car windows with their Chase cards in their mouths and wads of cash in their hands. They also sang Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” which was odd for a group of twentysomething men, but they seemed to be having fun.

After the outage was fixed, Chase began addressing the fraudulent withdrawals by debiting the stolen funds from users’ accounts.

This left some users with huge debts and blocked bank accounts.

A social media user shared a video of his Chase account showing charges totaling nearly $40,000 after he allegedly tried to promote TikTok trends.

Another user had a negative balance of almost $11,000 in his account.

“Bro, what the f*** man. I know I shouldn’t have put up with this shit man,” he says in the video. “This Chase glitch shit man, don’t do this shit.”

Jim Wang, a finance educator who spoke to the New York Postwarned that people who abuse the glitch could face serious consequences.

He told the outlet that those who tried it are now seeing “large amounts of money” or “huge negative balances” on their accounts. Wang warned that people who tried it could get into “huge trouble” because they were essentially committing check fraud.

Austen Allred, CEO of the Bloom Institute of Technology, commented on the trend on X, calling it “check fraud” and criticizing TikTok for popularizing common criminal scams as lifehacks.

“It seems like for every form of fraud out there, there’s a TikTok influencer who discovers it and thinks it’s foolproof,” he wrote.