When a speaker at Nacha’s annual conference last month asked who knew someone who had been the victim of a payments scam, nearly every hand in the room went up.

That’s the sad state of the U.S. experience, as criminals worldwide try to dupe unsuspecting consumers, job-seekers and those searching for romance into sending them money under false pretenses. 

Americans are bilked out of $119 billion annually, the Consumer Federation of America estimated in a March study. That includes an approximation of incidents that go unreported, perhaps because people are too embarrassed to admit they fell for what seems like a transparent ploy in hindsight.

The House Financial Services Committee unanimously passed a bill Thursday aimed at better protecting elderly people in the U.S. from such financial fraud, partly through better collaboration among government agencies and financial institutions in detecting and thwarting fraud. The legislation also calls for increased enforcement against bad actors.

Now, Nacha is preparing the industry for the final phase of a new rule that for the first time will require financial institutions of all sizes to be more attuned to fraudulent deposits coming in. In March, it began phasing in the rule, and it becomes applicable industrywide in June.

Under the rule, U.S. banks for the first time will have to be more vigilant about accounts that receive funds, in addition to those that send payments. The rule was intended to target push-payment scams in which consumers and executives are tricked into sending payments to criminals, whether via romance ploys, investment schemes or business email compromise.

“Nacha has tried to mind the front gate, if you will, with the origination, and now this is expanding to the entire end to end,” PNC’s head of global payments, Sarah Billings, said on the sidelines of the conference she chaired this year. “Hit it from every angle you can.”

Fraud is a perennially hot topic at Nacha’s Smarter Faster Payments conference. That’s partly because the problem keeps growing worse, now with an assist from artificial intelligence. 

AI not only ratchets up the number of potential victims criminals can target via emails, texts and fake websites, it also corrects all those spelling and grammar errors that used to be telltale signs of a con. 

Fraud is also increasingly showing up on social media, prompting some banks, like JPMorgan Chase, to crack down on how their customers use those portals to send money.

Fraudsters’ success has also allowed them to reinvest their profits for the industrialization of fraud, expanding the scale of their arsenal, army of workers and ultimately, their threat to others.

“The fraudsters are at it 24 by seven, and we need to be there as well, and we need to harness the entire community,” Billings said.

The threat of fraud is getting more attention in Washington these days. In addition to the legislation passed this week, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Treasury Department this month formed a public-private roundtable to solicit feedback on how to combat payments fraud. 

Those moves also follow a call from the White House in March to boost efforts to combat fraud and cybercrimes.

One of the biggest complaints from some industry executives and trade group leaders in the past has been a lack of communication and collaboration among banks, with governments turning a blind eye to a scourge ravaging U.S. residents. 

Now, maybe those who have been sounding the alarm will get some help in pushing back.