Alas, nearly every problem in the US stems from politics. A problem which could have been solved easily will keep being a problem for another decade.
Regulators could have solved the problem at its root and make the scams impossible, but no, they would rather shoot the messenger and force money transfer service to do government's job. At the expense of everyone else.
It's just like dealing with many differnt large codebases that has multiple language, is managed by multiple different departments and teams.
The same thing happened in Big Tech. Bugs are usually not fixed until they become a critical issue, not because they can't be, the solution is either too simple and not worth it (allocating resource to it become negative return because it's not aligned with the companies goal or KPI, so any second you spent on it, is like you're doing it in your free time, no one in the company will appreciate the effort) OR it's too complicated and there's no easy way out without some party compromising.
In the end, a bug or something that could actually improve UX, is simply dismissed because how you felt is less important than the data and figures.
I think making transferring money much faster/easier instead of the current ACH system would help.
But I’m assuming you’re thinking of other things.
Require physical presence in the bank with machine readable biometrics passport for account opening (just like everywhere else) and boom, half the fraud schemes are gone. US forced all other countries in this world to require physical presence in the bank (great initiative, btw), but made an exception to themselves.
Require machine-readable passport with biometrics for large cash withdrawals (just like everywhere else).
Create a centralized, machine-readable, PKI-enabled proper identification infrastructure (just like everywhere else) instead of painted plastic which they call driver licenses, create a centralized, unified, secure registry of all people instead of using SSN and boom, the rest of fraud schemes become useless.
Just start with this, easy to implement, simple solutions which will pay for themselves in a few years. No need to invent a bicycle, numerous countries went this way long time ago, there are no unknowns on this path.
Alas, again, politics.
US, perhaps, is the only developed country with gift card scams problem.
I couldn't think of a worse gift than a gift card. It has same level of thoughtlessness as gifting someone a bunch of cash, but brings them less utility because they're constrained to spending it at a specific store unless they on-sell the card at a haircut from the face value.
What do you mean by everywhere else? I'm not required to have a passport for large cash withdrawals in Switzerland, a normal id card is enough.
I wish we had all that here in the US.
There is a good balance between security, efficiency and privacy in Switzerland. US should emulate CH.
The problem with that in the US is that the US - unlike almost every other developed nation - doesn't have a requirement for people to possess a government issued ID card or a passport. The reasons for this are multiple: right-wing/"sovereign citizen"-type of people afraid of the government building databases or whatever, people exploiting illegal immigrants (aka well-connected farmers and meatpackers) who would not be able to pay their staff, and people on the left who see it as yet another expense to be paid by poor people.
Not sure the legality on requiring this sort of ID for financial transactions though.
For one, crack down on caller ID fraud so people from scam call centers in India can't impersonate the IRS or whomever else. Next, require phone carriers to combat robo-dialers in general, even with correct numbers these are a plague.
I trust they finally will do the right thing. After having tried everything else of course.