Tag Archives: bankers

There is a setting that I had forgotten about and I was reminded of this by the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzp7y8e7vo) in here we see the headline ‘JP Morgan sues customers over viral TikTok cheque fraud’. To help you with this setting I take you back to 1981. I was in the draught army (pun intended) and like any teenager on a short budget I sometimes ran out of budget in week 3. Now when you had a postal account there was a nice trick. You had a postal cheque which could be cashed in for $500, no questions asked. Now this goes against your balance no matter how slim it was, as such you always had access to $500. As such in times in the last week you cashed it in without having a good balance and you started the month with minus something and then the wage came in setting you in the plus. Is you plan it nicely you could spread that minus over two months setting you in the clear. It wasn’t a great way, but when the numbers are aligned against you it was a solution. The interest was really low in those days, so it would set you back less then $2. All this happened in 1981, 43 years ago. So now we get “US banking giant JP Morgan Chase, is suing customers who allegedly took advantage of a glitch by illegally withdrawing thousands of dollars from its ATMs. The “infinite money glitch”, as it became known on TikTok, allowed the bank’s customers to write a large cheque to themselves, deposit it and then withdraw the funds before the cheque bounced.” OK, this had a little setting that people rote cheques to themselves and withdrew it before the option crashed. Then we get “Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that JP Morgan Chase closed the loophole a few days after several videos telling people about the glitch went viral on social media.” Is it really? I used the $500 option in the Netherlands 43 years ago as such, how did the loophole get created in the first place? As I see it this is all about greed driven protocols, protocols the negate certain timestamps, and now JP Morgan is crying fowl? Yes, another pun intended. And If I can recollect this setting, so can others. Is it fraud? That is the question. You see fraud is states as “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain”. The wrongful or criminal deception is key. Were people allowed to write a check to themselves? If that is legally allowed the fraud fails. There is a financial gain, yet if these people claim that they were going to pay it back the fraud is wobbly at best. In the ned it is for a judge to decide if the case can be made. Yet even as I accepted what I did in 1981, there was never a step of personal or financial gain. I merely ‘allowed’ my account to be over-drafted for no more than a month and the maximum amount ‘borrowed’ would have been $500 for the best part of a week. As such the fraud setting becomes debatable but it hangs on the setting if a cheque can be written to ones self. 

As for the amount we are given “The amount of money kept by the defendants in the four lawsuits totalled more than $660,000, according to JP Morgan Chase’s lawyers” as such I wonder what other protocols (or better stated policies) were ‘glitched’ to make for easy money making by the banks. The fact that they are now turned against them is to some extent hilarious. The simplest setting is that you cannot write yourself a cheque for any amount. One simple rule that could have stopped JP Morgan Chase ‘losing’ money as I see it.

I might be wrong on this as I am not a banker. I asked Francesco di Medici and he agrees, but he reeled at the idea of a piece of paper supporting $660,000 so there is that too.

Have a great day.