I guess we'll have to take screen shots of those reviews for when the bank holds us liable for recipient crookery...
This kind of thing is simply banks pushing their security costs and liabilities on to customers.
Of course, that is all old hat (you and the bank manager would probably wear hats on the street outside the bank). With automation comes remoteness. With remoteness comes distrust. With automation, remoteness and distrust, comes optimization for the simple case, and the impossibility of anything that strays from the One True Happy Path.
There are rising sea levels, but it is a Wide Molasses Sea that is rising. Everyday life is drowning under a tide of viscous stickiness, pervading and delaying all we hope to achieve. It induces a vague techno-dystopian premonition, then occasionally, and suddenly, a sense of desperate powerlessness. The trivial small-print on a nonchalantly-ticked online form stops your life, like a blunt rusty bureaucratic stiletto pushed slowly through your wide disbelieving eye.
It was pretty stressful. I did the obvious research, reviews, streetview, even phoned them, but all that can be faked if they try hard enough.
Fortunately they are legit, and I was reasonably sure they were before I clicked on "buy". I did discount a similar site because I wasn't convinced.
My mom is not a techie. She doesn't necessarily think of "fake sites" as being a thing. So a reminder that there's fake out there is not necessarily a bad thing. (To be fair, I work at keeping her at least a bit cautious.)
I don't know if it's pushing any bank costs or liabilities away. If you pay money to a scammer, I doubt the bank is liable. I'm not sure the bank can determine the legitimacy of a receiver, or tell a real transaction from a fake one.
- Gov pushes their security responsibilities onto banks, and other financial institutions (including crypto exchanges LOL).
- Banks make your life a real pain, as a brutal proxy for the authoritarian government that ducked their responsibility.
- You have very little recourse, few alternatives, and no way to complain through automated just-hang-on-at-your-own-expense-until-bankruptcy-or-death call-centers in some remote Asian location.
- Banks insist on 2FA, so now your phone is the most important device in your entire life, a single-point-of-failure between you and everlasting damnation in phoneless-2FA-purgatory, you can't even call them!
- Do not have your phone stolen, or drop it in the swimming pool - you have to keep it in a safe, which you cannot do until you actually buy a safe ffs! - and then buy another phone for actually calling people.
- Just hope your pre-paid time-limited balance doesn't run out, and don't even think about travelling, or moving country - if you move they will forget that they already Knew-You-as-a-Customer, and start all over again, but with less upfront trust - hell, you moved country, how is that legit!?
Ask HN
Tell HNHave they thought this out?
Does anyone at the FCA read HN? (I think some do.)