A rumor that circulated online in September 2025 claimed a video showed residents of Memphis, Tennessee, riding stolen U.S. National Guard tanks through the city's streets. This issue gained attention around the same time U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Sept. 15 directing National Guard troops to the city to combat crime. Snopes received reader website searches for this matter and also located numerous users sharing the video on social media.
For example, on Sept. 14, a Threads user posted (archived) the video with the text caption, "Men have taken armored trucks from the [National] Guard in Memphis!" The video's onscreen caption read, "YN's stole 2 tanks from the National Guard in Memphis, Tennessee already! 'They left the keys overnight.'" The rumor also appeared on Bluesky (archived), Facebook, Instagram, Threads (archived), TikTok and X (archived).
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting about people in Memphis stealing National Guard tanks. Prominent outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.
Rather, a reverse-image search for individual frames from the authentic, unaltered video located the same clip featured in a WorldStarHipHop article (archived) from June 5, 2020 — more than five years prior to Trump's National Guard deployment in Memphis.
Further searches found a Reddit comment (archived) pointing to an X post explaining a local hip hop artist purportedly rented the tanks to use them as props in a music video in Atlanta, Georgia. The post (archived), also from June 5, read, "No tanks were stolen from National Guard in Atlanta, they were old British tanks rented by a local hip hop artist to make a music video."
A spokesperson for the National Guard told Snopes by email, "The National Guard Bureau confirms there are no tanks deployed into the streets in Memphis. Furthermore, NGB also confirms no one stole two tanks in Memphis, or elsewhere for that matter." We also contacted media relations personnel for the Memphis Police Department to request their official confirmation of the false rumor and will update this story if we learn more information.
For further reading, in January 2024, Snopes reported on another story claiming a video showed tanks near the Texas-Mexico border.