Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there people that like cheques? For no good reason, I keep a list of why I use checks (in the U.S.): - Charitable donations because charities maximize every penny, and electronic contributions eat into that - Paying the accountant - Good accountants make every penny count, and aren't interested in paying credit card overhead. - Tipping the paperboy at Christmas - Tipping the doorman at Christmas - Business licens…
In Finland, and I imagine in most of Europe in general, people just make bank transfers for most of those things. Unlike in USA you cannot just pull cash from someone's account if you know their bank account number, you need to setup SEPA Direct Debit to do that and it requires explicit authorization from the account owner. It isn't even really used much in Finland, most companies just send electronic invoices that y…
People say things like this as if the money taken in a fraudulent transaction just disappears and is untraceable, and unrecoverable. That is false.
It's one of those scare tactics that the middlemen use to sell a vision of financial-techno-secure-utopianism in order to collect a percentage of the money. Don't fall for the marketing.
The money has to go somewhere: Into another bank account, usually, which is easily traceable since banks by law have to know who they're dealing with.
Even if a check gets cashed at a check cashing store, the store requires ID, the person getting the money is on video, sometimes they have their fingerprints taken by the store, and if something still goes wrong, the store is on the hook for the money when the transaction is reported as fraudulent and reversed.
These are all problems that were largely solved last century.