Be Wary of Trending TikTok Hacks | Opinion

Social media hacks are great for so many things. You can learn the “life changing technique” of how to cut a pineapple without a knife, or how to give yourself a wolf haircut. Most of these hacks are harmless—some are ingenious. Others are ingenious, but not harmless. The latest of these latter category is the viral trend known as the Chase Bank glitch. The “hack” goes like this—roll up to a Chase ATM, deposit a check for any amount (but declare its worth as high as you want), then withdraw funds at the ATM based on the amount you claimed to have deposited (much more than the actual value of the check).
TikTokers have promoted this as a way to get free money. And too many folks out there truly seemed to believe that this counted as a “hack,” a quick way to make money that just hadn’t occurred to anyone before.
In fact, it had. Pre-internet, that was just called, er, writing a bad check. It was probably fun back then too. But then, like now, you might go to jail for it.
The Chase hack is much more entertaining than going to jail, and it makes great viral content. But a surprising number of people are learning for the first time that cheating your bank out of money is not a “hack.” It is, in fact, a crime. Chase—rightly—saw this as stealing money that wasn’t yours. That’s fraud.
Banks have complicated systems in place to detect these kinds of activities, some of which don’t operate at the speed of virality. When those systems fail to immediately capture fraudulent activities, some folks may think they’re getting away with bank fraud. It happens beyond the ATM, as banks regularly contend with scammers who think they can outsmart the system by, for example, breaking up large transactions over time to avoid scrutiny or moving money through a series of different locations to obscure its source. Sadly, for the would-be scammers, but fortunately for the banking system writ large, banks are required by the Bank Secrecy Act to continually adapt to new money-laundering threats like this.
Banks use different systems to identify emerging scams and put a stop to them. But the result is the same. A bank’s fraud detection system will percolate up notifications of repeatedly fraudulent activity until the humans ultimately responsible for monitoring fraud catch wind. Then, in circumstances like this, banks can sometimes make quick adjustments to their systems (as Chase did here). Sometimes, the adjustments may require more complicated solutions. But ultimately, bank fraud is simply not going to work for long.
Stopping any kind of fraud is important for the sanctity of our commercial and financial systems. But it matters even more in the bank context. For better or worse, banks and other financial institutions are our first backstop against the movement of dirty money. While money laundering might be the last thing on the minds of TikTokers promoting this hack, passing fake checks and cashing out is a prime method to do it. Thankfully, financial institutions have to follow the Bank Secrecy Act, which lays out the set of rules for stopping money laundering. We rely on banks to do this well. Otherwise, we have no good way to know if there are folks trying to hide dirty money in the financial system. Since so many other crimes rely on moving money around without detection, stopping the movement of dirty money is critical to effective law enforcement.
These days, banks have an added incentive to do everything right, because the government has added a new tool to its belt to enforce compliance. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is responsible for monitoring whether companies are following the Bank Secrecy Act, now has a whistleblower program that allows individuals to come forward and tell the government when companies aren’t following the rules. If the government acts on their information, the whistleblower can potentially receive an award. This whistleblower program heightens the stakes for banks to ensure compliance, since insiders now have a direct avenue to expose their misconduct.
Social media can be an excellent way to learn how to cause a cucumber shortage. It can also be a way to learn how to stay out of jail. While the Chase Bank hack was a way that everyday people learned how to commit fraud, perhaps with this op-ed, it can also be a place to learn about how to look out for fraud that comes in the form of promises of fun, free money.
Either way, we’re writing here to educate people generally how to curtail the damage—this “glitch” could leave you with a negative bank account balance and a criminal charge. If you are looking for that handout from your bank, well, now you know there might be a compliance system out there that you may be tripping—and you could end up going viral for the wrong reason.
Poppy Alexander and Hamsa Mahendranathan are partners at Whistleblower Partners, representing whistleblowers in a variety of industries and under all the whistleblower programs, with a particular expertise in financial fraud related matters.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.