Statements has no effect (if/else) in PS - powershell

Question

I'm working on a script that gets executed only if X account is found, but is not working as intended the if/else statements get bypassed and the code gets executed anyways. What am i doing wrong?
$Account = "XXXX"
Get-LocalUser -name $Account
if (($Account) -eq $true) {
} else {
Write-host -foreground cyan "I found it"
}
exit
If i ran the script as is it will output the text on the console even tho "XXX" account is not present, could something like that can be done?

Answer 1

This should do it:
$Account = "XXXX"
$AccountObject=Get-LocalUser -name $Account -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
if (($AccountObject)) {
Write-host -foreground cyan "I found it"
} else {
Write-host -foreground cyan "No luck"
}
The issue with the sniplet provided - the return of Get-LocalUser was not used. Instead you were using a string value which is always set therefore true - as you set it to 'XXXX' in your first line.

Answer 2

As Bill_Stewart explains, the reason that the else block is reached is because ($Account) -eq $true evaluates to $false unless the account name is "true".
In order to test whether Get-LocalUser succeeded or failed to retrieve the user account, you can instead inspect the $? automatic variable - it will have a value of $false only if the previous command threw an error:
$AccountName = "nonExistingUser"
# Try to fetch existing user account, don't show any errors to the user
$UserAccount = Get-LocalUser -Name $AccountName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
# Test if the call was successful
if($?) {
Write-Host "Found account named '$AccountName'!" -ForegroundColor Cyan
$UserAccount
} else {
Write-Host "No account named '$AccountName' was found ..." -ForegroundColor Magenta
}