If there’s one thing people on the internet love doing, it’s debating the legitimacy of posts that sound too insane to be real. Take this confessional from a Chinese student who was studying in the U.S. He claims that before graduating and returning to China, he was able to max out credit cards from multiple banks adding up to $140,000, and hopes to use this “pot of gold” to contribute to his motherland.



There are a few potential red flags — the ease with which an international student with no work history or credit score could get access to credit cards from Chase, Citibank and American Express, for one, and the fact that the post ends with the cartoonish declaration of, “This is a strong blow to American imperialism! A final lesson for American capitalists!!!”


Yes, it definitely sounds like a real person wrote that and not someone’s idea of a 1980s communist cartoon villain.


To the first point, several people pointed out that it was an insane line of credit for a foreign college student to get, although others argued that some banks and credit card companies deliberately target college students with offers because they’re financially inexperienced and not particularly financially literate yet. One tweeter even shared the tale of their own exploits, writing, “I had a credit line of $100k over multiple cards in college with no job. Wasn’t a foreigner but my work history and salary were all made up,” which, to be clear, is fraud, and illegal, and not something you should confess to on social media where everyone, including the authorities, can see.


Others argued that banks are aware this sort of thing happens but “have built it into their risk factors and business process and will still always come out making shitloads of money regardless of any scheme.” One responder, who claims to have worked at a bank writing credit decisioning algorithms, tweeted, “Yep. We lent £100m in knowingly unrecoverable bad debt just for the sake of data. What was more genuinely terrifying was when people found ways of opening large numbers of fake accounts with fake IDs and doing it in bulk.”


The more I learn about banks, the more they seem like a precariously positioned house of cards, ready to collapse (again) at any moment.


One enterprising commenter wanted to know if this could be done in reverse — “maxing out cards in like Iran or something and then fleeing back to the U.S.,” and the consensus appears to be, “No,” so there goes that retirement plan.


Good luck to OP in his mission to revive China with stolen American cash, although I think the Chinese economy has been growing decently without his intervention up to this point. A little cash infusion couldn’t hurt, though!