On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Colin Slater wrote:
the banks cannot control SMS delivery nor guarantee anything and therefore don't like it. SMS is not a guaranteed-delivery system, which both Telecom and Vodafone go to great lengths to remind people of whenever there's a problem. Using it for security systems is optimistic at best. Both T and V have had system failures where messages haven't been delivered for several hours, even days, if at all.
And anyway banks don;t make any money from retail banking so until phishing and e-banking scams become sufficiently common they still pale in comparison to manual frauds.
Article I read on Monday said that banks (I'm assuming in the US) write off 50 billion (yes, with a b) dollars a year in low-tech faked-identity frauds involving "legitimately" issued credit cards. Phishing is a miniscule problem by comparison - average phish is four figures, with relatively low incidence, compared to five figures for the credit card frauds and quite a high incidence. -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer."