It depends on the amount. Do you want $100, or $1000? They are much more likely to give you $100. And she was friendly and "normal" looking and was very good at not setting off people's radar apparently. But yes, you would think in the modern age the banks would have figured out a way to verify funds.

A lot of people get paid by paper checks still, esp manual laborers. They're going to need to get groceries and pay the rent. They can't really wait several days for their pay to show up in their accounts

But why even use checks in the first place? Seems like a weird thing to hold onto.

[deleted]

[removed]

>It'd be more harmful getting rid of this loophole then allowing it.

What is the gain in allowing it?

According to Wikipedia, she started in 2013 - so everyone in New York, USA had a card, so allowing oneself to get scammed by a check was a choice.

PS: I'll mail you a check for 3 milliard EUR, just send 1 milliard EUR to my bank account.

And we're all the better for it being that way.

Oh yeah. Totally.

Checks can't be verified in real time. That's a huge underlying issue: it can sometimes take days or weeks to realize a check is bad.

I needed to learn it for a few classes

It was a time

Banks will often immediately make available part of the value of the check immediately as a courtesy.

Please read this entire message

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

Questions based on a false premise are not allowed on ELI5. A question based on a false premise is one based on information that may not be true, or may not be the whole truth, and needs that information to stand as a question.

If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.

It's called check kiting. There's a 'float' between depositing a check and the actual funds appearing in the bank. During the float, banks will allow withdrawals against the deposit.

Obviously if the funds do not come through, it's fraud.

Do these work similarly for while loops?

Just the same as Apple's macOS ran on Intel chips, just like Windows does. It's just math and logical operations according to the CPU.

Ahh, ok that makes a lot of sense. So, rather than doing a one-to-one translation, figure out how I can take advantage of python's capabilities vs whatever language I'm trying to convert code from.

Secondary question:

Is your comment related at all to programming paradigms? Like, I think all the code I know how to write would be considered "functional" (I didn't learn anything about paradigms in school), so after seeing some discussion on paradigms and watching some videos, I'm trying to understand "when would I use object-oriented" or another paradigm. So maybe if I learned to write in a different paradigm, it could be a better fit than what I'd be able to write in functional?

Controlling flow from inside loops is done with break and continue.

Something like this:

for (i=1;i<=10;i++) {
  if (i==5) SOMETHING
  print i;
}

If you use break for SOMETHING your output is: 1 2 3 4

If you use continue your output is: 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10

Some languages let you control multiple levels of looping using something like break 2 to break not only this loop, but the loop it's inside. Javascript lets you do this with labels. Not all languages give you this level of control so you either figure out how to design the process without nested loops or come up with other ways around the issue like GOTO's or flag variables that direct outer loops to break when set from inner loops but those situations have no single right answer.

It's very common for banks to make a portion of a deposit available immediately as a courtesy for its customers. While it may take several days for the checks to clear and the customer to access all of the deposit, it does tend to keep them happy if the bank floats a portion of the difference for a couple of days.

Sorokin took advantage of this fact, depositing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad checks, while only withdrawing tens of thousands against them.

This is why most places don’t take checks, only cash or card. Usually only if you really trust the person do you accept checks; and that was her whole scam, to make people think she was trustworthy.

Because that process takes time, up to several days. And if it took several days for people to get money from their check no one would use it. So instead they give you the money immediately while the transaction is verified.

Yes, it allows for these loopholes, but people exploiting this in this manner are far and few between. It'd be more harmful getting rid of this loophole then allowing it.

one of the all-time best journalism films

At this point, Visual Basic itself is a niche edge case :D

I have slowly tapered down. From liquor to light beer, but then I get to like 3 beers a day and I get super scared to go the rest of the way to 0 and then I get depressed and go back to liquor. Viscous cycle

Coming from a country where we don’t really use checks, it seems absolutely ludicrous to me that banks would allow this kind of loopholes in their systems in the US. Shouldn’t it be mandatory that the bank can verify the existence of the funds before allowing withdrawals?

Some languages also kindof have you using GOTOs and labels for exception handling...I wanna say Visual Basic? I did a project a few years ago using CrownPeak CMS which at the time I think used VB for its templating language and I vaguely recall winding up with a lot of really snotty "ON ERROR GOTO HELL" clauses. I think some legacy data applications that had a lot of functionality written in SQL procedures used that sort of error handling instead of more modern try-catch-finally or try-with-resources blocks. It's all true but I don't think I'm inaccurate in saying they're pretty niche edge cases for most programmers.