Yes it’s obviously hyperbole. My point was that banks do have security practices in place that go beyond weird password rules.

The girlfriend story unfortunately did happen. The part I left out was that the cheque bounced despite being from a reputable company – most likely an HR system glitch. This leaves the bank with 2 options: This person is doing something shady, or the big company that successfully pays thousands of cheques per day is being shady.

Guess which one the machine learning algos say is more likely :)

PS: when you sign the back of a cheque you become legally liable for that cheque not bouncing. If it does bounce, the law says you are committing fraud. The bank is therefore within their right to stop all service (they do send you your money back after killing your accounts)

That was a fun lesson to learn