BEWARE: Viral Tik Tok financial advice

People are able to learn all sorts of new skills on TikTok: how to dance virally to popular songs, how to make hot cocoa bombs and paint an accent wall. They are also able to learn questionable financial information from unverified websites that suffer from millions of followers.

TikTok personal finance and investment: also known as #FinTok and #StockTok. This is a segment of the app which has become extremely popular. It features experts that make videos that provide financial advice.

The Number #1 Myth going around is that the Federal Reserve has secret million-dollar bank accounts for every American citizen

A woman claims that she has discovered a letter that correlates to a bank account owned by the Federal Reserve and attached to your name containing millions of dollars.

She says that if you look up the routing number of your local bank and enter your Social Security number as the account number, you can make purchases with them. “I have used it on my energy bills and the payment went through,” she says.

The New York Times went into depth on this myth and the Federal Reserve’s attempts to combat it back in 2017. Multiple Federal Reserve banks issued warnings to the public not to fall for this rumor.

The Atlanta Fed warned at the time. “Any video, text, email, phone call, flyer, or website which describes how to pay bills using a FRB routing number or using a FRB account is a scam.”

The Federal Reserve clarifies that routing numbers are used to sort and process payments between banks and not to make online payments.

In just a three-month period of that year, The Times reported that 107,000 payments totaling more than $100 million had been refunded because of the scam.