>The answer is to have some mechanism whereby people who run into these issues can pay (once) the small cost of being validated in an alternative way (like, actually talking to a human and explaining what's going on, which is how these issues got solved in meatspace originally)

The answer is to have electronic money accounts and transfer services be operated by the government, and to make it the government's problem to go after criminals rather than have the businesses left holding the bag.

That way the business is not incentivized to discriminate, as long as they get the money through the government money transfer service, they are guaranteed it as if they received cash.

Corollary is that you also need a law that guarantees the right for everyone to have an electronic money account that can send and receive money and that no government can take that ability away from you at any point in time.

And the government has to operate an identity verification API. And again, the onus is on the government to go after criminals committing fraud.

Once you put the onus of fraud or damages on a business, then every business will obviously start discriminating to minimize those costs.

For small and mid sized players, it’s not to save a few bucks. If your fraud prevention isn’t locked down tight then you will draw enough fraud that it threatens your ability to take payments at all. This stuff can kill a business in a bad day or two.

Take it up with the payment providers. They provide fraud prevention but like to leave vendors guessing about how to configure it, and make it a premium add-on, which is kinda fucked up since they’ll boot you off for letting too much fraud through. It’s a protection racket on the vendor side—they’re also being screwed by this state of affairs.

It's not to save the cost of a few bucks. Once people find out your site is easily susceptible to fraud, the majority of your traffic will be fraudulent. It only takes a few minutes to post a repeatable scam you found in a scamming discord for bragging rights, or to write a Python script to repeat the task over and over.

But humans are the easiest to con.

I've worked in fraud prevention professionally for years and adding a human verification layer to the equation would make me vastly less likely to believe a suspicious applicant was legitimate.

This is secondary to the main topic, but:

The externalization of costs onto customers is something I've noticed hard with the pandemic. Going to get medication at the pharmacy while fewer and fewer people worked and hours were closed, and finding out after the pandemic it's shitty still with multiple pharmacy chains having workers walk out and protest these conditions. As a customer - waiting in line for a refill can be endless. Being on hold in a call center, because you won't pay people enough to work your shit jobs, and handle issues locally, meanwhile, the time-cost is externalized on to us in longer wait times.

Workers/Customers lose, somebody's winning, but it ain't us.

(Again, this is NOT the same issue and not a complaint about the main topic).