“One last big score” is a common trope in crime movies. A criminal who’s tired of the game, but knows no other way of life. He has no appetite to make it on his own in the real, honest world. And so he pulls one last job with a payoff big enough to set himself up for life so he doesn’t have to become, like, a fish salesman, or whatever people in his real world do.
Which brings us to Charles Ray Fuller, whose “last big score” was also apparently his “first, clumsy score,” kind of the premature ejaculation of bank fraud. One bright spring day, Fuller decided to walk into his local bank and attempt to cash a check for $360 billion.
The bank, curiously, suspected something was up and notified the police. But that’s not the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is what was going through this guy’s head when he walked into that bank? Did he think this small bank had $360 billion in cash on hand? Did he really understand how much money that actually was? He could have tipped the entire planet into recession if he’d pulled this off. But of course the answer is that nothing was going through his head when he tried this. By even daring to consider this stunt, our man Fuller demonstrated a pretty horrendous lack of understanding about how checks, banking, and possibly zeros work.