Things that make you go "Hmmmm…"

[retina]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Do you mean if we open an account with $1 in it and somebody sends us a million bogus money, we can take the million in cash and go to bora-bora, before the bank clears the whole story with the sender?
And if we don't know about it, and don't touch the million in the bank, the bank will ask us to pay ten grands for "storage" when they find out the benjamins are fake?

Strange world...
(preparing right now to send you all some millions bogus money, so you will pay tax to the bank...)

You will have trouble to get cash, but you can write cheques. And then your cheques bounce (and you get fined).

It is abused for fraud (of course).

If you have a place to rent:
You: I'm looking for people to pay me to stay here for $1000/month
Fraudster: Me, pick me. Here is a cheque for $5000 to cover deposit and first two months.
You: Cool. Thanks.
Fraudster: Oops, sorry, I sent too much. Please refund me $2000 via WU.
You: Okay, seems fine, the funds are in my account. Here, have $2000.
... several days later ...
You: Hey, your cheque bounced. Give me back my $2000.
... more days later ...
You: Where are you. Reply to me!
... more days later ...
You: Oh F... F... F...! I've been scammed.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

No. When you make a deposit, the receipt has a disclaimer that the funds will not be available for a while. With a large deposit -- say over $10,000,00 -- additional rules kick in. A portion of the funds may take longer to become available.

A practice called "floating a check" is -- or at least used to be -- quite common. You could write a check on an account with insufficient funds, provided the account was going to get a big enough deposit to cover the check before it cleared. Someone "living paycheck-to-paycheck" might do this at the end of the month, when their account was nearly tapped out, just before they got their next paycheck. It depended on the (then) fact that it took days for a check to go through the mill.

Ah yes, that worked well when physical paper checks were endorsed and stamped and returned to the writer after having served their purpose. Mailing a check, the effective payment date was often that of the postmark, not delivery to the payee or deposit at their account. Then more days passed as the banks got around to communicating, via physical checks going to a clearing house.
US banking is strange, and credit unions get their turn at doing things oddly.
Some I've been on the wrong end of:
Mortgage prepayment, teller insisted on applying it first to the month's interest. Then the regular payment with payment stub, they took the same month's interest AGAIN, more than doubling the effective interest rate.
Person who handled mortgage payments went on a long vacation. I got a letter threatening foreclosure, while my mortgage payment sat in her desk drawer instead of being processed. (Other mortgage payment mailed same day, to my 80-something retired farmer father, got handled properly.)
Because of the foreclosure letter, the payment was assumed to have been lost in the mail. A stop payment fee was charged at my bank. I provided the credit union branch manager a new check for the payment due, and he offered to credit me (refund) the stop payment fee since the issue was from their lack of proper handling of a payment received on time. The credit union CHARGED me an amount equal to the amount they should have REFUNDED. Another visit to the branch manager fixed that. But the whole sequence occupied hours of sleuthing and travel time.
Another bank shut down their server room because their air conditioning was not prepared for a warm spring day. All depositors were limited to $200 cash withdrawal per day, regardless of account type. I needed to cover an investment purchase before hopping a plane in 2 hours for a few days out of state on business. By refusing to allow the needed withdrawal, from a demand account, they violated the terms of the account. Same operation categorized an IRA as a different type than what I had opened. They eventually started charging for cashier's checks for withdrawals (without notice), so I switched to withdrawing and transporting cash directly from there to another bank. I had a nice long chat with a manager there about why I was pulling all accounts from their firm at my earliest convenience, and that as manager of IT, I would never have tolerated the server shutdown and business shutdown, at my place of work, that they did at theirs. If someone had to pull ceiling tiles, and round up fans to cool the server room, reconfigure for running a reduced load, and sit or stand guard for the workday, that's what would have happened.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by retina

Here, have $2000.

Bingo!
That's what I said...

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by retina

If you have a place to rent:
You: I'm looking for people to pay me to stay here for $1000/month
Fraudster: Me, pick me. Here is a cheque for $5000 to cover deposit and first two months.
You: Cool. Thanks.
Fraudster: Oops, sorry, I sent too much. Please refund me $2000 via WU.
You: Okay, seems fine, the funds are in my account. Here, have $2000.
.

Thanks for prepaying your first 3 months and last month. (Deposit is for damages first, then any remainder to unpaid rent.) If you would like to prepay half or all the rest of the year lease when those 3 months of occupancy have passed, rather than monthly, I'm game. Please note that the lease contains no provisions for return of rents paid during its term or before damage costs have been determined after nonrenewal or vacating.

[Xyzzy]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/some-...hing-20201118/

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.quantamagazine.org/some-...hing-20201118/

I think the hardest part in proving that the interior angles of a (not necessarily convex) n-sided polygon
in the Euclidean plane add up to (n-2)π is in defining precisely what you mean by interior angle!

[rogue]

Mystery monolith in Utah

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by rogue

Mystery monolith in Utah

And so it begins. We already have reason to visit Clavius Crater. We need to stop the Europa Clipper now.

[Nick]

"And I was like, 'What?'. And he's like, 'There's this thing back there."

Does "I was like" mean "I thought" or "I said"? Or is it non-specific?

[kruoli]

Yes, "And I said..." "And then, he said" etc. But it is quite informal.

[tServo]

A mysterious metal monolith was spotted in the Utah desert by a helicopter team doing a wildlife survey.
It was in a pit surrounded by a bunch of agitated Australopithecus afarensis.

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ut...rnd/index.html

Just kidding about the last part.