Chapter 347: Earthquake in the Financial World!

The headquarters building of Huaqi Yinhang, located at 399 Park Avenue in New York, transformed from a quiet financial fortress into a pot of boiling porridge within fifteen minutes of Chu Chen finishing his performance!

The original design intent of this building was to withstand all external threats—bulletproof glass, fingerprint-access doors, twenty-four-hour uninterrupted surveillance, and a data center in the third basement level said to be able to withstand a nuclear strike!

But the person who designed this building did not consider one type of threat.

That is the threat of public opinion!

Public opinion can breach any fortress!

When Chu Chen transferred tens of billions in balance from Brian's Huaqi Yinhang account, the financial world of New York exploded!

The news headlines were more sensational than the last!

【Huaqi Yinhang system breached, tens of billions in funds transferred】!

【Magician 'vanishes' tens of billions from insurance tycoon's account on stage】!

【Huaqi Yinhang responds to account anomalies: currently investigating】!

These headlines spread like wildfire across the internet; everyone who saw the headlines did the same thing: pulled out their phones, opened their banking apps, and checked their balances.

Huaqi Yinhang's customer service lines were completely overwhelmed eight minutes after Chu Chen disappeared!

The switchboard was flooded with call volumes hundreds of times higher than usual in a short period, and the system automatically cut off new connections under its overload protection mechanism!

Customers calling customer service no longer heard hold music, but a cold recorded voice: "All agents are busy, please call back later."

Then a "beep," and the call was disconnected.

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Xiusidun, Jiushan—

Huaqi Yinhang branches across the United States saw long queues forming over the next few hours!

Although it was still the middle of the night, the lines at various branches already stretched from the entrance to the street corner, and then wrapped around half the block from the corner!

Some people brought sleeping bags, some brought folding chairs, and some brought power banks.

They were not there to withdraw money, but to confirm one thing: is my money still there or not!

In front of the New York branch, a middle-aged man at the front of the line said something while being interviewed by a local television station, a quote later cited by countless media outlets:

"I don't not trust the bank. But just now, a guy on TV, in front of the whole world, transferred tens of billions out of someone else's account. You tell me, why should I still trust it? I want my money back! Cash!"

The CEO of Citibank issued an emergency statement within half an hour of the incident.

The statement was written in all capital letters, which is extremely rare in corporate PR releases and is usually interpreted as "the situation is so serious that there is no time for rhetoric."

The content of the statement had only three sentences: "Citibank's systems have not been breached. Customer funds are safe. We are working with law enforcement to fully investigate this matter."

This statement was taken down fifteen minutes after it was released and replaced with a new statement with more cautious wording.

The new statement deleted the sentence "Customer funds are safe" and changed it to "Citibank is actively assessing the impact of this incident on customer accounts."

This change was interpreted by financial analysts as: they themselves are not sure if the funds are safe!

And the stock market gave the most direct answer when it opened the next day!

Huaqi Yinhang's stock price plummeted by eleven percent within the first fifteen minutes of opening, triggering a circuit breaker and pausing trading for five minutes!

It fell another seven percent within half an hour after trading resumed, with a total daily decline of over twenty percent, evaporating tens of billions of dollars in market value!

This was not because investors were irrational, but because investors did the math: if a bank's system could be penetrated at will by one person during a magic show, then the bank's core competitiveness—security—no longer existed.

This affected not just Huaqi Yinhang alone, but the collapse of trust in the entire banking system!

To avoid similar incidents, a rare bank run occurred in the United States banking sector!

Because there was no cash, the liquidity of the banking system completely dried up!

The clearing systems of all banks in the United States, and even major global banks, were affected!

The stock market crashed, the bond market froze, the foreign exchange market came to a complete standstill, cryptocurrencies skyrocketed, and an unprecedented financial crisis erupted instantly!

That night, no one in the United States financial world could sleep.

Wall Street analysts were still writing reports at three in the morning, with headlines more sensational than the last:

【Has the security myth of the banking industry been shattered?】

【The Chu Chen Effect: A crisis of trust in the financial system】

【If he were a hacker, we would already be finished】

But the real hackers knew he was not a hacker!

A forum on the dark web called "Deep Blue" was flooded with thousands of new posts in the first hour after Chu Chen disappeared.

This forum had fewer than five thousand registered users, with active users usually maintaining around a few hundred.

But that night, the server was crashed by traffic twice.

The content of the posts was not discussing Chu Chen's technique, but mutually confirming the same fact—whether or not he actually hacked into the bank's system.

A user with the ID "0x5f3d" posted a long thread titled: "I watched the surveillance footage four times. He did not hack into any system."

The content in the post was repeatedly cited: "The bank's transfer system has three layers of protection. The first layer is the firewall and intrusion detection system, processing tens of thousands of scans per second; any abnormal traffic is flagged. The second layer is the transaction monitoring system; every transaction goes through hundreds of risk control rules, and the larger and more abnormal the amount, the stricter the screening!

The third layer is people—the bank's transaction review team; any transfer over a certain amount requires manual verification.

Three layers of protection, each operating independently. To penetrate all three layers without triggering any alarms and without leaving a trace in any logs—this is not something hacker technology can achieve."

In the reply section, another user with the ID "kernel_panic" added a more detailed explanation:

"The bank's system is not connected to the internet. When you log into online banking at home, you are only seeing a 'window' into the bank's system; behind that window is an isolated internal network. Real transfer operations must be completed on the internal network. This means if you want to attack from the outside, you need to first penetrate the outer firewall, then find the path to the core accounting system within the internal network, then bypass the transaction monitoring system's real-time audit, then obtain authorization with sufficiently high permissions, and then mix your transaction into dozens of simultaneous transactions. The probability of every step is close to zero. It's not 'very difficult,' it's 'impossible.' No hacker in any country can do it. No military in any country can do it!"

Below this reply, the most-liked comment was only one line: "Then how did he do it?"

There was no answer.

Even the top-tier hackers did not know how Chu Chen did it!

The moderator of the "Deep Blue" forum wrote one sentence in the final pinned post before the server crashed, a sentence that was later screenshotted and spread across the entire internet:

"We spend our whole lives studying how to breach systems, but he skipped the 'breach' action entirely. He made the system transfer the money out itself. We really don't know how he did it!"