Some people with particularly bad spending habits use debit cards as a way to enforce self-control, but there are probably much better ways of achieving that. Teenagers also use them when paying with their own money because you can't have a credit card until you're 18 unless it's an authorized user card on your parents' account. Costco used to make you pay with a debit card, if I remember correctly.

But those are pretty much edge cases. Credit builder and secured credit cards exist for people with poor or no credit.

> Costco used to make you pay with a debit card, if I remember correctly.

Costco, gas stations, and some mom & pop shops really want to save on that credit card processing fee.

Personally, I consider missing out on the cash discount at a gas station a convenience & fraud protection fee.

Costco used to have an exclusivity deal with AmEx that prevented other credit cards from being accepted. They did accept debit cards however.

They now have a deal with Visa, along with their own branded Visa card but will accept any bank's Visa card.

Venmo fraud is even worse. My sister got scammed out of thousands of dollars recently and her bank just said "pay up"

I wrote about the story here:

https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/how-banks-help-scammers-with-t...

That's a bit of a different case.

As cruel as it sounds, your sister performed a legitimate transaction.

I'm not sure I agree. How should anyone know that it might take six months for their bank to know whether a check is real or not? Does anyone who isn't actually a bank employee know that? (What percentage even of bank employees know that?)

It seems to me that a person ought to be able to reasonably rely on a bank acting like a check has cleared, at least after some clearly stated period of time.

As far as the bank and the law is concerned, they are two separate issues.

There isn’t a dependency.

The legitimate account holder said “Send $x from my account to y” and the bank did.

There was no fraud in that transaction.

As for your second point - funds are required to be available before the check clears by federal law. Complain to your congresscritter, not the bank.

Not sure why I’m getting downvoted for stating simple facts...

Fair points, but not directly on the issue raised by the complaint. Its not about the legitimacy of the sending money off transaction, or about the funds availability policy. What the victim was complaining about---and what I was agreeing with---is the bank's failure to have any mechanism to communicate when a check actually cleared.

Fixing that wouldn't require a change to the funds availability policy, and wouldn't require it to dishonor any transactions. As the original complaint indicated, it would literally just be a UI tweak: the online banking system could highlight provisionally available funds differently from really really available funds, and in that way communicate to customers what is actually cleared and safe to spend. This isn't a big ask.

In addition to protecting account holders from a massive range of fake check scams, that would also protect them from a bunch of other crooked stuff.

For example: did you know an employer can reverse a direct deposit of a paycheck for some amount of time after it seems to go through?[1] Employees get screwed all the time when their employer randomly decides "oops, we paid you too much" after the money is already spent. Which is insane and unfair but---we wouldn't even have to change the system to protect many employees. Just have banks clearly indicate which direct deposits are final and which might still go poof if the employer unilaterally decides.

[1] old example https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/23/business/turning-direct-d... --- but I know people to whom this has happened this year.

Checks actually “clear” quite quickly nowadays. As in, the money gets pulled from the check writer’s account and made available to the depositor within a day or two (notwithstanding whatever the depositor’s bank hold policy happens to be). The problem is, if the transaction proved to be fraudulent (as in the check was written by a fraudster on a random persons bank account) the real account owner can dispute the transaction weeks or months afterwards. This is normally going to be long after the check has nominally “cleared.”

Once the check is disputed, the money gets yanked back from the depositor’s account. That’s why personal checks are just a completely unreliable method of payment and should only be used between trusting parties.

> Not sure why I’m getting downvoted for stating simple facts...

Welcome to HN.

That's not true of debit cards. If the card is used fraudulently you just dispute the charges the same as you would with a credit card. The bank reverses the charge and the vendor has the opportunity to sue you if you really did make the alleged charges.

The distinction is this.

Your card gets stolen.

Scammer empties out the account.

With a credit card, transactions against the card will get declined after it maxes out (if the fraud checks don't kick in sooner). You report the theft. Everything solves itself quickly. A minor inconvenience at worst.

When your debit card gets stolen, that's YOUR money going out, then your rent check bounces, and it takes weeks to get the money back, and in the meantime, YOU HAVE NO MONEY.

I just disputed an ACH transfer and they refunded it ... That is probably even less secure then a debit card?