In the video, three grown men stand in the back of a mostly empty bodega around an ATM, a fat stack of dollar bills on a shelf beside them. The location is nondescript; the store appears stocked with everyday goods like pasta, cooking oil, and plastic cutlery. But the thousands and thousands of dollars in $20 bills, which one man picks up and fans out for the camera, is anything but normal for the setting. Debit cards do not usually allow account holders to withdraw more than about $1,000 in cash a day. Using a Visa DashPay card, which is briefly visible in the video, the men were pulling every dollar out of the machine.

It was the weekend of July 11, and similar scenes were taking place in bodegas and delis across New York City. In the span of about 48 hours, some $17 million was taken from ATMs in a heist that led to a frenzied black market and social-media pandemonium. The mechanism was the prepaid DashPay debit cards issued to teens enrolled in a city-sponsored job program. It turns out the cards featured a lucrative technological glitch: They could withdraw unlimited amounts of cash.

Dating back to the 1960s, the city-sponsored job program, called the Summer Youth Employment Program, has connected low-income youth ages 14 to 24 to paid work and early career opportunities for six weeks in July and August. To pay the teens, the program issues prepaid debit cards, which allow younger kids who do not yet have a bank account to access their earnings. On July 11, the program’s first payday, kids took their debit cards, issued by a payments company called Dash Solutions, to ATMs around the city and withdrew cash, up to a limit of $200 or so. When they went back for more money, the teens noticed that the balance on the screen did not decrease, according to program directors. So they took out more cash — and then even more. Then they started spreading the word on Instagram and TikTok.

Card scams that take advantage of an overlooked glitch in a company’s payments system are not uncommon. Last year, in what

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