TikTok Chase 'free money' trend is not, in fact, a glitch

One of the biggest pieces advice given to anyone starting a new TikTok account is to follow and respond to current trends. On TikTok, "trends" are the viral "everyone's doing it" videos that often pop up one after the other on your For You page.

Over the weekend, a trend started going viral that boasted a "glitch" in the Chase ATM system. Like most trends on the app, it started spreading rapidly -- until a few days later when people started figuring out that things were not as they seemed.

This "glitch" isn't actually a glitch at all. Essentially, people started figuring out that if you wrote a check to yourself and used an ATM to withdraw the money, you could get "paid" before the bank realized it was a bad check. But as I said, this isn't a glitch. It's check fraud. Oops?

What happens when you try something like this is that your bank actually takes back the money you didn't actually earn. So if you were to "take out" more money than you actually had in that account, you would now find yourself with a negative balance. And there's no getting that money back. Because the money never existed in the first place.

So, congratulations -- instead of free money, you're now in debt. Hopefully that didn't ruin your weekend too much.

TikTok trends can be fun, and should be enjoyed when they're innocent and not hurting anyone. But plenty of trends have put people in danger (or worse), so it's extremely important to not only look into trends before you senselessly follow them, but also look into them as a creator before you potentially start them. Going viral is not always worth the consequences, especially when the consequences could impact you for the rest of your life.