Meme fraud
Committing a crime is easy. Committing a crime and getting away with it — that's hard.
One of the big stories on the internet last week was the Chase bank "viral TikTok trend." Long story short:
- There was a short-lived bug in the Chase banking system that allowed users to deposit a cheque, then immediately withdraw the full amount of that cheque (normally, the funds would be held until the cheque cleared).
- This bug became public knowledge. Social media posts popped up which encouraged people to write cheques for large amounts to themselves, then withdraw or transfer the funds from the account to give themselves "free" money.
- This is called cheque fraud, and in America it's sometimes prosecuted as a federal crime.
- Multiple people posted TikTok videos of themselves withdrawing huge amounts of cash from Chase ATMs and celebrating.
- These fraudulent cheques inevitably bounced, leaving those who attempted to exploit the "free money glitch" thousands of dollars in the hole.
- Again multiple people posted TikTok videos, this time crying over their negative account balances and impending criminal charges.
The prevailing narrative surrounding this whole thing is one of stupidity. There's no shortage of posts and TikTok videos mocking those who tried to exploit the "glitch" as idiots for not realizing what they were doing was illegal, or for believing there's such a thing as "free money."
And I'm not sure this is a matter of not knowing what cheque fraud is, or that it's a crime. I think a lot of people, even if they don't fully understand how or why, recognize that many great American fortunes are built on fraud.
An "entrepreneur" in Silicon Valley can put together a pitch deck for a startup based on a vague idea, pull in millions in investment, pay himself a ludicrous salary out of those funds for years, then fold the company with nothing to show for it — and as far as any legal authority is concerned, so long as the startup can claim they had one or two engineers doing something, all those lost millions were just the cost of doing business.
For that guy, there absolutely is such a thing as "free money." So it's possible to look at him and think to yourself, "Well, why not me?"
And your mistake there would be not realizing that the rules for the entrepreneur class are not the rules for the working class. A Silicon Valley founder who scams a bank out of millions is the Man in the Arena. A guy who works at Wal-Mart and scams a bank out of a few thousand is going to jail.
A criminal is not a special kind of person, or even a specific set of actions. A criminal is a context. And the failure of those who participated in the Chase cheque fraud scam may have been a failure to recognize context.
New Short Story: "Move Fast and Break Things"
My short story "Move Fast and Break Things", which originally appeared in the Grendel Press anthology The Devil Who Loves Me, is now available as a standalone work! You can get it as an ebook or read it on Medium; if you're one of my Ko-fi supporters, you can also read it on Ko-fi.
This Week's Links
Dead birds get new life: New Mexico researchers develop taxidermy bird drones
Taxidermy bird drones - currently being tested in a purpose-built cage at the university - can be used to understand better the formation and flight patterns of flocks. That in turn can be applied to the aviation industry, said Hassanalian.
P(Dumb)
The narrative that artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating toward "AGI" that will eventually outwit humanity’s efforts to contain it, has gone unchecked by one important segment of the population: the people who write the laws, and the people who whisper into the ears of those people. What they’re whispering is stuff like "P(Doom)": your personal confidence level (usually rendered as a percentage) that a rogue artificial intelligence — and not anything else — will annihilate humanity. A lot of things have to happen first for this to even be a possibility, let alone something you can assign a probability to.
Bill Gates, Big Agriculture and the fight for the future of Africa’s farmland
"We used to grow diverse crops," said Mary Sakala, a Zambian farmer and chairperson of the Rural Women’s Assembly, which commissioned the report. "But now governments and agribusiness have pushed farmers into monoculture that depends on inputs. Their programmes have made us all vulnerable."
If we're going to start resurrecting crimes from the 1930s, I'd like to see some rich people get ripped off in a huge elaborate confidence game. I think we've earned this, as a society.
-K
