They should be - but they should also have some leniency from lacking clear intent. The people who spread this "hack" obviously knew it was check fraud and some of these folks may have known it... but some others may just be rubes. Obviously it'll come down to the actual trials but it'd be good to let most of these folks off with just returning the stolen funds with no additional punishment. There isn't really any deterrence value from punishing people who knew no better for exploiting a now closed loop hole - there's no possibility to copy cat the check fraud now.
I'd also love to see the FTC go after JP Morgan for such a fucking large security hole - this hack was only possible because of their negligence.
I'm sorry, but no. Anyone who did this knew it was theft fraud. And if they didn't, ignorance is not an excuse for breaking the law. I'm not usually on the side of the justice system, but this was clearly wrong. Maybe they don't need to fill up our jails, but some community service is deserved.
if there's a button that says "free money (don't press)" and you press it's absolutely the fault if the company for leaving the button out in public. It should be expected that any user input can and will be abused.
banks are legally obligated to credit checks within like 24 hours of deposit, there is no glitch, you could do the same scam at any bank, its extremely common. the alternative is congress turns back the law and banks start holding your deposits for as long as possible before crediting them.
Idk I hate corporations but this one is 100 percent on the dumb fucks who thought by pretending that "money glitch" defined what they were doing instead of the reality "check fraud crime".
In this case, though, what's the damage? These attacks happened in a spike and all the accounts overdrawn are tied to social security numbers and real life folks through provable links (assuming Chase did its fucking job during account registration)... Chase can recoup the losses pretty trivially and they should have a literal bank ledger of every transaction. So direct monetary damages seem nil assuming people haven't lost the money (and I'm only advocating for no additional punishment if the parties can make Chase whole).
Then what about deterrence - we punish people to discourage future criminal actions... this loophole is closed and nobody can exploit it in the future. Additionally, given the flash mob nature of this, I don't think any bystanders would see the response to this and think "Fuck, I'm going to check fraud myself" the event is over, the window has passed.
So I feel like any additional punishment (again, beyond reclaiming the fraudulently withdrawn money) would just be vengeful - and I don't think vengeance based punishment is moral.
I’m not sure all that cash was just kept in the pockets of the perpetrators. I would be surprised if even half of the stolen amount was trivially recovered.
Until the next free shopping glitch where I just transcend the door without paying. You are correct this problem is with parenting, society in general,and education.
I don't mean to be confrontational, I genuinely want to know where it "explicitly does".
I'm not in the US and my countries criminal code has a § (§17 german stgb) that as long as you are legally competent you are responsible for your actions even if you were ignorant of the law.
If you are pointing at those that are not legally competent/ non compos mentis, I think the point there is not so much the not knowing of the law, but being unable to understand a law.
I assume some variation of this exist for other jurisdictions, but in the US, some crimes require prosection to prove "intent" (mens rea) Depending on the crime, you might have to know that it's illegal for mens rea.
In US Tax Court, there's precedence that ignorance of tax code is a defense for criminal tax.
Agree on all points. Like these people clearly committed fraud but if you're careless enough to get suckered into this you probably weren't the most financially savvy person to begin with. Balancing the scale should be enough. On the other hand the banking sector really needs to modernise. So much is built on archaic legacy systems and there doesn't seem to be any motivation to modernise and foolproof them. The economies too busy chugging along to care about how secure the foundations of it are.