The Pursuit of Cash

In the recent "The Chase Glitch Proves Checks Are Stupid" episode of the Slate Money podcast, Felix Salmon, with some backup from co-host Elizabeth Spiers, argues that the young people who wrote massive checks to themselves thinking that they could obtain free money this way should be forgiven, because "Gen Z" simply doesn't understand how checks work.

Personally, I think the problem is that a lot of people, and not just "Gen Z" don't understand how money, let alone banking, works, or even what money really is. So it makes sense that it's unrealistic to expect young people to understand how checks actually work. But I don't think that forgiveness should be on the table so easily, because even of young people didn't understand check fraud, I suspect that a lot of them do understand taking something from someone else, and thinking that they would never be caught.

If you haven't heard about this, the basic gist of it is simple: A person writes themselves a check for some (usually fairly large) amount of money, deposits that check into a Chase automatic teller machine, and when the ATM shows the new account balance, withdraws some amount of money from the machine... generally much more than their original balance had been. The check bounces, because there wasn't enough money in the account to cover it, and the would-be clever person now finds themselves deep in the red. This had been touted on TikTok (because of course it was) as an "infinite money" "glitch" over the holiday weekend and while the number of people who rushed to take advantage of it has been wildly overstated, there have been several examples of people online showing their bank balances going negative once things started shaking out.

While I understand the idea that many of the people who showed off the money they believed they'd been able to get on social media didn't have the mens rea for check fraud, attempting to take advantage of a perceived flaw in a system to benefit oneself at the expense of the people who run the system isn't exactly above board behavior. If a person can reasonably be expected to understand that ATMs don't print the bills they dispense to people, then it's reasonable to presume that people understand the money comes from somewhere, and likely belongs there. After all, this is not a situation in which the understanding was that Chase was holding some sort of promotion or giveaway, and people thought that the bank was intending to give them money with no strings attached.

Rewarding ignorance, or even making it less painful in circumstances where it otherwise carries consequences, creates something of an incentive to ignorance. High profile prosecutions of people for attempted check fraud, even if they didn't understand that's what they were doing will push people towards realizing that understanding how their bank accounts actually work is better than not understanding that. Harsh lessons are still lessons, even when it seems distasteful to teach them.