The Bleak Truth About the Viral Chase ATM “Infinite Money Glitch” (2024)

Just before Labor Day weekend, word started traveling around TikTok about a “glitch” at Chase Bank ATMs. A few viral posters noticed that they could deposit a check and withdraw a significant portion of the funds immediately, rather than after a holding period of several days. They then got an idea that people have been getting for generations: What if I’ve just stumbled onto a consequence-free trick to legally steal money from America’s largest bank?

Here, TikTok itself became a problem. People have published financial advice for generations, but vertical video apps have empowered financially illiterate creators to push their ideas directly to other financially illiterate users. By the holiday weekend, word had spread around the app and seeped into the rest of the internet that there was a way to take free money out of Chase ATMs. TikTok’s algorithmic For You page pumped it around the country at hyperspeed, and quickly the hype ran right into reality. Sad young men posted about five-figure negative balances in their bank accounts. Media outlets published stories pointing out that stealing money with bad checks is criminal fraud. Chase released a statement confirming that it had “addressed” the matter, and that was that.

Those golden few days of “the Chase glitch” are a flashpoint in dumb social media lore. Intentionally writing a bad check with the goal of stealing money is one of the most obvious frauds imaginable, and even better, it’s a fraud against an ultrapowerful bank that has the customer’s name, address, and Social Security number. Some people racked up lots of debt trying it, though we’ll never know how many or how much. Next week, there will be a new dumb thing. While the Chase episode was a harmless bit of fun for most of us, it’s troubling that TikTok has become the most efficient engine in human history for the conversion of crooked, hopeless financial advice into a cool money hack that could change your life.

There are, believe it or not, some very good financial influencers on TikTok and Instagram. They’ll tell you about the importance of budgeting, the miracle of compounding interest, and the benefits of opening a high-yield savings account. Some of the influencers doing this work have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, and they reach people who don’t have their own financial advisers or much education about their Benjamins.

The unfortunate thing about the existence of good financial advice on the internet is that lots of terrible financial minds either think they can provide some of that good advice or trick rubes into believing in their wisdom. These predatory posters can do quite well, because they promote flashy (if illegal or implausible) tricks to build wealth quickly. TikTok’s algorithmic For You page sure seems like it’s really good at widely promulgating the ideas from this group of hucksters. Earlier this year, a self-appointed “business coach” on the app (who at the time of reporting had a midsized following of about 13,000) virally explained the art of getting an expanded line of credit by generating dummy invoices and passing them between her own network of LLCs. See, this approach created the impression that she was selling inventory to other businesses, as she explained. (Some prosecutors might see that as fraud, and if not, it would still create fake “sales” that would require the person running the scheme to pay taxes on nonexistent income.)

Dozens of different versions of this video and idea are floating around on any given day. The classic of the genre was a 2023 super-viral video in which a guy explained how one could open up a business credit card, buy anything they wanted, and never have to pay for it because “you are not personally liable” for the expenses incurred under a business card. (“What if I told you that there was a way to buy things like this $100,000 watch without using a single dollar of your own money, using business credit like this that you never have to actually pay back?” he said, holding a stack of American Express cards as he waded around a nice pool.) The widespread response to the video was to lampoon it, but presumably a nonzero fraction of the audience thought it was a good idea. America is rich in many natural resources, none more than people who will fall for a dumb guy’s idea of a smart guy.

When someone isn’t breaking through the noise to admit to and advocate that others commit financial crimes, someone’s breaking through with another ridiculous money idea. Here’s a cool clip of entrepreneur and influencer Grant Cardone (2.6 million followers on YouTube, 2.2 million on TikTok, 5 million on Instagram) explaining that 15-year-olds should be investing $300 of allowance money in real estate each month. That investment then returns $30 on a monthly basis, Cardone explains. How? I do not know, given that there are not many short-term rental properties or apartments on the market for the price of allowance money.

One negative consequence of all of this mess is that it poisons the entire internet financial advice well, a resource that should have a democratizing effect. The online financial communities that get the most attention are places like the WallStreetBets subreddit, where the memestock phenomenon was born, or Discord servers or Telegram chats where crypto traders pass around ideas. Sometimes, a dumb bit of TikTok virality takes over the zeitgeist for a few days. That is a shame because it makes it easy for people to think they simply shouldn’t trust what they see online.

Meanwhile, there are vast internet communities and publications full of people who have pretty reasonable money ideas. Maybe the most famous finance subreddit should be r/Bogleheads, a hub for index fund investors who advocate tracking the whole stock market and never picking individual stocks. Maybe TikTok’s algorithm should juice influencers who are pushing this one crazy trick of getting free money from a bank by opening an account that pays 4.5 percent interest. (Customers at Chase could use this advice. They get around 0.1 percent.)

Episodes like the Chase “glitch” are also a bummer because they can make people even more cynical about the economy than they’d already be. The financial deck is indeed stacked against a lot of people in TikTok’s core demographics, which is to say “younger people.” Oodles of student debt. Very high home prices that make the idyllic American Dream seem out of reach. These aren’t new things, but they are worse now. It is not hard for a scrolling 27-year-old to lose hope that they’ll ever get ahead.

A viral scheme to steal money from a bank preys on that feeling, whether it’s intentional or not. It would be miles more productive to urge disaffected people to throw their life savings into crypto or GameStop stock, which are at least new phenomena that break some traditional rules about money. They probably won’t, but maybe those objects of speculation really will go to the moon, and their biggest boosters will be right. We live in strange times, just not strange enough for fake checks to be a get-cash-quick scheme. If TikTok wants to supercharge shoddy financial ideas, it should at least pick newer ones than fake checks.