I have worked in fraud prevention, detection and analysis. Depending on a lot of factors the weakest link is either the retailer where fraud occurs, the bank's

I have worked in fraud prevention, detection and analysis. Depending on a lot of factors the weakest link is either the retailer where fraud occurs, the bank's protections systems or the customer. Retailers would a lot of the times not do additional security checks because those cost money. If someone buys something for 5-10$ the retailer doesn't pay for additional verifications to the bank and they are then liable for the loss. Sometimes they won't even pay for that for larger amounts OR that they avoid doing those checks because it breaks the transaction flow and the customer might just cancel the transaction - most of us are impulse creatures and if we're adding additional checks then the impulse could be stopped. Banks also still use SMS messages for verification. SMS is horribly insecure[1] and it's shocking to see it's still the last line of defence between your life savings and a potential attacker. Yet having worked in this field, I know that the decisions are taken from a purely financial/time frame point of view. "We have 6 months to implement this, our devs have done this before and thus an SMS carousel is the easiest to implement. TADA". Or "we have already the contracts setup, we have done this for this other account type, so we're going to reuse it". There are very few incentives to use anything else and it goes back to adding friction in transactions. If our world wouldn't be obsessed with buying quickly and easily, more defences could be added. Lastly, banks are horrible at talking to people. They don't know how to do it at all, so they cannot make communications clear. The biggest impact to fraud prevention would come from nationwide campaigns were users are shown some of the most common ways these attacks occur. Common sense suggestions also seem to lack entirely - "if you're ever unsure, pick up your credit/debit card and call the number on the back of it. That's your bank's contact number, it doesn't need a website, you don't need to call a number from a message, just call this one number". One bank I worked at did this small communication exercise and over the next few months it accounted for a significant decrease in phone-related fraud. It's a very complex issue and I'm seeing Europe being the next big target from what I have seen regarding anti-fraud processes in European companies (a lot of them rely on outdated tech that cannot handle checks fast enough). European banks also move a lot slower than UK banks, transfers move slow, security checks are poor and in general they seem to spend A LOT less money on fraud prevention... Cybercrime is on the rise[2] and we're horribly unprepared. Blaming people is the worst approach. We can all fall victims to these types of attacks, but we should spend time to educate those around us and exercise a bit of caution, yet understand that we can all be victims. [1] - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/can-we-stop-pretending-sms-is-secure-now/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/can-we-stop-pretending-s... [2] - https://risk.lexisnexis.com/-/media/files/financial%20services/research/lnrs_cybercrime-report-july-dec-2021_research_nxr15415-00-0322-en-us_2.pdf https://risk.lexisnexis.com/-/media/files/financial%20servic...