Well, my opinion is that a ridiculous root cause of all this is the lack of a central, government-supervised, secure, instantaneous, free, direct payments syste

Well, my opinion is that a ridiculous root cause of all this is the lack of a central, government-supervised, secure, instantaneous, free, direct payments system. Such that all these stupid private bank-based services are attempting to fill that void and don't get it right when they do it. Not to say that such a service would not also have vulnerabilities. But you hear about all the bounced check / advance fee / text message validation scams going on now, and you would think that the banks would want to get this liability off their hands and into a central service that they can just be rid of the responsibility. (ok, on the other hand, having an irrevocable transfer system might introduce new problems as well, but still...) I find it unfathomable why we continue to saddle ourselves with one of the most ancient check-writing based systems in the world that people in other countries laugh at us for (or ask in puzzlement, "what is that?"), and have to make all these terrible workarounds to deal with.