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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Let's say I get a USPS account and attempt to cash a bunch of fake checks.

Now what?

Just curious. Europeans under 60 most probably only know about checks from US movies, and would never have seen one irl. Are checks still used over there and if so why?

Cheques allow you to give someone a large amount of money (that would be too unmanageable with cash) without knowing anything about them but their name. Don't need to know an account number or a phone number/email address. Pretty handy.

Also, I am 36, and I live in a country (Denmark) that has entirely abandoned cheques, but I am still familiar with Danish cheques (even if I never managed one myself). Additionally, I still see them frequently when I am in France. (Though these days, the vast majority of cheques I see are US cheques, since my wife is American.)

Care to precise which country in Europe?

Checks to pay for a kid's school trip, or a soccer club membership, etc are very much a thing in many of the EU countries with 50+ million inhabitants.

France is an extreme outlier in the EU when it comes to payments by checks (84.7 percent of total check payments in the EU in 2020 happened in France). But even there the method is rapidly falling out of favor [1] be it less fast then it has been in other EU countries [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443371/check-payment-in-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110744/share-total-eu-c...

There are only 3 EU countries with 50M+ inhabitants. Germany, France and Italy. Only in France is the concept of checks still a thing, but mostly amongst the elderly in the countryside.

Your comment is technically correct, as there are only three such countries (Germany, France and Italy), and two of them (FR and IT) indeed still use checks to some amount. But the biggest county in the EU certainly doesn't use checks, nor do numbers 4-18 (Ireland is #19).

According this graph[0], there were over 1 million cheque payments in Greece, Germany, Cyprus, Malta, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France in 2020. I recognise that the data is a bit dated, but it still seems like these countries maintain the concept of cheques.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443677/cashless-payment-...

You are right, "don't use checks" was too strongly worded. Nevertheless, your own link shows that - except for France - the check usage is on the order of at most a few checks per person per year. So not exactly a widely used payment method.

> as there are only three such countries (Germany, France and Italy)

Bedsides being wrong, as another comment points out, you’re describing the EU’s largest economies.

No, I am describing the three EU countries with 50M+ inhabits (Germany at 80M, France at 65M and Italy at 60M). Of course, the largest counties in population are also often the largest in GDP...

> Let's say I get a USPS account and attempt to cash a bunch of fake checks

No-credit banking. That means the funds are not available until the cheque clears.

If they’re low income, are you going to hold their welfare check for two weeks? (yes, I know direct deposits exist)

I'm only asking as many people who are "unbanked" are unbanked because no bank wants to do business with customers who play fast and loose with the rules.

Electronic payment is ubiquitous outside US.

Where cheque are still used, they verify and clear them the same day.

There are little reason to cash a check when everyone have a bank account

get rid of checks. They are a terrible system which are horrifically out dated, with far better alternatives available.

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