JPMorgan Chase On A Chase
This Week In Blunders – April 13-19
“OK, boys; let's go make a withdrawal.” – John Dillinger
JPMorgan Chase is still chasing more than a thousand check-kiting customers who learned how to swindle the world’s largest bank watching TikTok videos last summer.
The bank is now turning to state courts, suing customers who stole less than $75,000, CNBC reports. It was already going after bigger thieves in federal courts who pilfered much larger amounts. And it has sent more than 1,000 letters asking hot check writers to return their easy loot.
Criminal charges are likely to follow.
The bank won’t say how much was stolen in the online viral sensation dubbed the “Infinite Money Glitch.” But the fact remains that its bankers left the vault door wide open on this debacle.
These are not the world’s smartest people when it comes to fraud. In 2021, some JPMorgan Chumps essentially bought a fake email list from a 20-something swindler for $175 million. They might as well be wiring money to Nigerian royalty.
In August, viral videos on TikTok and X explained how you could deposit fake checks at JPMorgan Chase for tens of thousands of dollars and get most of the cash out before the bank’s dupes could figure out the checks were hot.
Jackasses who tried this stunt were convinced it was just some kind of technical issue and that somehow their withdrawals could never be traced. The bank issued a statement to media to explain to these idiots that what they were doing was a crime:
“Regardless of what you see online, depositing a fraudulent check and withdrawing the funds from your account is fraud, plain and simple.”
It’s almost impossible to believe the amount of money that anyone could withdraw on a check before it cleared. This is on JPMorgan Chase. What were they thinking?
“On August 29, 2024, a masked man deposited a check in Defendant’s Chase bank account in the amount of $335,000,” the bank said in a court filing in Houston. “After the check was deposited, Defendant began withdrawing the vast majority of the ill-gotten funds.”
Who is dumber? The bank or its TikTok-loving customers?
At least customers can blame a nationwide financial illiteracy epidemic, and all the idiots giving advice on the Internet, for not understanding how the banking system works. What can the JPMorgan Chumps blame? Their summer vacations?
Parts is parts at Harvard Medical School
Cedric Lodge allegedly ran the morgue at Harvard Medical School like a junk yard.
Buyers could swing by and pick out whatever they wanted: Brains, organs, skin and bones. Want to get a head? How about a big hand? Arms? Legs? Tell you what: I’ll give you half off.
Once selected from the showroom, Lodge would take these parts and pack them up at his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Then he’d ship them through the mail. His wife, Denise, would help.
It’s been two years since his arrest, but Lodge, 57, finally agreed to plead guilty, according to media reports. His wife, Denise, 64, pleaded guilty last year for arranging the sale of two dozen hands, two feet, nine spines, portions of skulls, five dissected human faces and two dissected heads.
One buyer was Katrina Maclean, owner of Kat’s Creepy Creations in Peabody, Mass., which sells“Creations that shock the mind & shake the soul,” a story in The New York Times notes.
This horror went on from about 2018 until March 2023 at one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools. Was anybody keeping track of this macabre inventory?
To top it all off, the dean of Harvard Medical School offered little more than thoughts and prayers in a statement cited by the Times on Friday:
“Cedric Lodge’s criminal actions were morally reprehensible and a disgraceful betrayal of the individuals who altruistically chose to will their bodies to Harvard Medical School’s Anatomical Gift Program. … While Lodge has agreed to plead guilty and taken responsibility for his crimes, this likely provides little consolation to the families impacted. We continue to express our deep compassion to all those affected.”
Siphoning The Tank In Motor City
William Smith embezzled more than $40 million from the civic organization where he served as chief financial officer from 2011 to May 2024.
Now that he’s facing 18 years in prison, he’s sorry. Actually, his defense attorneys put it this way in court documents: Smith has “evidenced remorse.”
But oh, the life he had chartering yachts and jets, scooping up real estate and luxury automobiles, racking up decadent American Express tabs, and spending wildly on pricey trinkets that will have no meaning in prison.
His girlfriend must have been elated when he leased her a Maserati Levante and sent her wire transfers totaling $3.7 million. He also spent more than $507,000 on floor seats for Detroit Pistons games.
The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, where Smith was crunching the numbers right into his own bank accounts, takes care of the Detroit RiverWalk and surrounding green spaces.
Discovering Smith’s fraud must have been quite a wakeup call for its donors and private partners (including General Motors). And the organization’s board members must have been asleep in their parks for years as Smith flashed wealth and looted with abandon.
Smith is now at the point where you have to express remorse in hopes the judge will have mercy in sentencing.
“I am ashamed of what I've done to the city and the project that I love,” he said in papers his attorneys filed in court. “This behavior is something that I will never show again. My intentions are to continue to work to restore the trust and respect of the community that I let down."
Smith’s attorneys complain he’s now a pariah in Detroit (go figure), and they say they’d like the judge to avoid making his sentencing decisions based on sensationalism. Still, friends, classmates and former employees of a restaurant that Smith owned offered support.
He “created opportunities where none existed, offered second chances to those society had given up on,” said one of his former restaurant workers. His parents described him as a “good and decent man.”
They’re all good men at sentencing. When Smith is sentenced on April 24, it likely won’t be a walk in the parks he was supposed to be managing.
Trump’s in the dumps on the economy
More Americans think the economy is about to get worse, and they’re increasingly displeased with President Donald Trump’s handling of tariffs, inflation and government spending, according to a CNBC poll released today.
Wall Street titans aren’t happy either – with stocks in the tank and billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio saying he expects “something worse than a recession.”
Last week, we did our own poll here at Business Blunders. I wouldn’t call it scientific. We didn’t get quite the 1,000 or more participants CNBC polled, but thanks to those of you who answered the call.
Here’s how it came out:
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Great stuff, Al. Love your writing style. It's incredible, the lengths some will go to just to have the luxury life and power. The mighty can fall! Refreshing to see the outcomes on a couple of these. I remember reading about them.
There all good men when its sentencing time. Ha!