Are we Becoming a Cashless Society?

It looks as though the world is going cashless

We have all heard the expression “the cashless society” and by now we all know that where there’s smoke, there’s a fire somewhere. We are also all finding out exactly how powerful the influence of the internet is and at last we are learning that every household must have a computer, no matter how much the residents resist it.

Progress

But this is progress. This is how we humans adapt ourselves and move along with the times. Here’s a quick example. Remember Amazon.com, the online bookstore that we older folks pooh-poohed and sneered at as we said, “It’ll never work. People like to browse and touch and feel the book they are going to buy”? Well, Amazon reported recently that it sold 73 items a second. No touching and feeling in there, right? Not even time for a quick sniff! Want more proof of the way things are going? EBay, the online auction site, is stated to have the 26th-largest economy in the world.

Staggering numbers, huh? Well, here’s another one. The incidence of online fraud is going into orbit.

Credit card fraud

All these examples I am firing at you are internet generated. And when it comes to internet transactions, credit card fraud is a major concern. This is what is leading the rush to a cashless society and the introduction of virtual currencies.

Paypal is an internet money transfer system which sends funds up and down using a combination of a credit card or checking account number and an email address. Anyone who uses PayPal will tell you that the system is smooth and efficient. They will also tell you that PayPal loves it because they basically watch what is happening and get a commission on every payment.

Here’s another one

Ukash is a newer entrant to the world of online commerce and it works differently. The website explains: “Ukash is delivered as a ready-to-spend PIN code, which can be used to pay directly at one of the thousands of Ukash friendly websites. You get it by converting your cash at any one of the 275,000 global locations and, soon, via online bank transfer.”

Basically if you want to spend money or transfer money or send your nephew a gift, you simply go into a store that sells Ukash vouchers, and buy “virtual currency”, then you go to your computer and send that virtual currency to where you want it to go. You can do it through your cell phone. No names, no addresses and best of all, no income tax reference numbers!

There’s no cost to purchasing Ukash vouchers. And because you don’t use a credit card, there’s no risk of imaginative hackers stealing from you. It also means that people without credit cards can shop online – good news for people in developing countries that don’t have high credit card penetration.

And many others

There are dozens of money transfer systems operating on the internet, some restricted to certain countries or continents and some universal. Most of them were developed in defense of fraud.

What’s next?

Most companies will have to upgrade its money transfer systems in the ongoing fight against fraudulent operators, those vultures circling overhead and waiting for some innocent to walk out into the street clutching money in his hands. It looks like we’re heading to that cashless society.