[cturner]

In the UK the government has somewhat gone after banks at a that level - money transfers. When someone falls for a scam and transfers money to a scammer, the government often makes the call that the bank is at fault for that. This is the absolute laziest thing the government could do, because it allocates all responsibility to the last line of defence rather than being an intelligent response to the problem.

This has led to the situation that doing a wire transfer regularly leads to intervention by the bank’s anti fraud team. This attitude has created a huge cost and risk overhead for all the banks, it forces inconvenience on consumers, and it hurts productivity of the economy.

A better way to combat fraud would be to drive improvements to the telephone network. Regulate to make the networks enforce accuracy of the phone numbers they are displaying, give the feature to reliably blacklist phone numbers, make the phone providers monitor for patterns of behaviour that look like scammer or mass marketing activity. There is no good reason that the phone companies should not have been expected to reach these standards decades ago. These fixes would assist with other law enforcement matters, such as tracing prank emergency services calls. But it requires meaningful work from policy makers, and it is not glamorous, so that never gets done.

[birn559]

There is another easy fix: Allow banks to educate customers, to maybe delay a transaction a bit, but don't allow them to halt or deny a transaction.