[LurkersWillLurk]

The other problem with this approach is that some proportion of perfectly legitimate funds likely will remain in pending for an inordinate amount of time, which dilutes the strength of the indicator in the first place.

[kenjackson]

Not necessarily. In most cases people won't check the status. As noted in the story the sister actually checked because there was some suspicion. In this case she would have paid more attention to the status and possibly could have said, "its still in pending... can't transfer yet". Of course the scammer would have a well-rehearsed reply, but it at least moves the level of suspicion up a notch.

[NovemberWhiskey]

So let's say banks do display 'funds available, but subject to recall if check cannot be collected'.

A year later, the internet will have thousands of threads on various sites with people complaining that their (real, legitimate) paychecks still show the indication weeks after depositing.

People who are so wishful-thinking that they think someone is paying them a 10% commission to deposit a check will still be wishful-thinking, and will continue to accept statements like "this is normal, you'll see it all over the internet" at face value.

[hakfoo]

Perhaps that would be the sort of customer dissatisfaction that would move the needle to something less Rube Goldbergish.

As I understand it, there is literally not a "transaction complete" message in the ACH protocol. After enough days without hearing an exception, you assume it went though.

U suspect this comes to the implementation model-- since it's so much based on batch files and potentially offline processing at the destination bank, they probably don't want the overhead of composing and returning a success response for the 95% of transactions that behave normally.