Once upon a time, there was this
stuff called money. It was made of something called rag paper and was very nice to handle when
fresh. It also came in round metal discs called coins made of silver,
copper and later, zinc. Sometimes the metals were layered like
sandwiches. This made the coinscheaper to produce, so it cost the
government less to produce the coins than their face value. If you
could make a quarter for nine cents that was good.
Bank notes, or bills were even
cheaper to produce. Special paper and dyes were required, and high
speed printing presses. Many notes could be printed at once, each
bearing a different serial number. At first, the ink was made from the
powdered wings of a South American butterfly. This made it
waterproof and smear proof when dry. Even today, with modern inks,
you can't wet a bill and smear the ink. If you can, it's
counterfeit!
Long after money came along,
companies and banks started issuing credit cards. Credit had been
around since before the country began, let alone our money. But it
hadn't been so organized before. Now, if you had a job, you could get a
credit card. The card would let you buy things and pay for them
later. Sometimes you would make multiple payments on one item, but
usually, credit cards were used for everyday items, and each month
you would pay some of the balance off, trying to get the debt down to
a level you could manage.
Some people were very good at this.
Many were not. They ran up huge debts at department stores, or
restaurants or during the Christmas season. And they struggled to
pay off these extravagances. Checks, which came along before the
credit cards, would go into the mail box and off to the company or
bank owed. Check were tied directly to money you had placed in the
bank, and you had to know how much money you had avoid “bouncing”
a check.
Then came ATM, check, and debit
cards. ATM were tied to your accounts and allowed you to draw money
out of the bank twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You
could draw as little as five dollars from the first machines, but
that soon changed and now most machines dispense only multiples of
20. Studies of consumers found that most people used 20 dollar bills
for transactions.
Check cards were used to guarantee a
vendor that if you wrote a check to him, it would be paid by the
bank, even if you didn't have quite enough in the bank at the moment.
This also prevented “kiting” a check, which was writing a check,
and anticipating a deposit before it came due. There were heavy fees
to pay the bank if you overdrew your account, but you weren't put on
a list of bad check writers.
Debit cards were the successor to ATM
and check cards. They allowed you to draw money from your account, but
also worked at vendors. You ran the card through a scanner, and
seconds later your purchase was approved or declined. If approved,
the money was drawn from your account immediately, but if declined,
no money moved, and you didn't owe a fee, but you had to pay in cash
if you had it.
All this convenience, everything
connected, buying at the supermarket or buying stuff online, paying
bills, parking meters, parking tickets, airline tickets, your dry
cleaning and car payment and mortgage.
It seemed as if the cashless society
was only moments away.
Then the cyber-criminal was born.
Scam artists, con men and computer hackers started to multiply
exponentially in cyber space. Soon after all the Nigerian finance
ministers were fired, a new threat emerged. There were programs
called malware, and computer viruses, and bot-nets and zombie
machines. All these attacked machines and networks that had
inadequate security or were fooled by the attack. Sometimes unwary
users downloaded something that seemed okay at the time, but later
found their system compromised or corrupted.
The first big wave of virus and
malware attacks were directed at corporations and organizations that
has sensitive data or deep secrets to keep. But there was little
money to be had in selling that, so banks were next to get hit.
Money transfers into secret accounts, a slow trickle designed not to
be noticed right away could take those fractions of a cent in
interest, siphon them off from every account in the banking network,
and that amounted to some serious cash. And now they're hitting
vendors from fast-food places to supermarkets to department stores.
It seems our cashless society is not such a Utopia after all.
I have often thought of how our lives
have come to depend on little things; keys, electricity, gasoline,
and money. And how interconnected we are through phones, tablets, and
computers. The world wide web is real, and technology is advancing
at an alarming rate. They don't offer instruction manuals with most
high-tech devices because no one has time to read them, and most of
the users already know how to manipulate them. It's learn by doing,
and if you screw up, it isn't serious and you can start over; reboot,
turn off and back on, back out of a website, do a system restore or
reset.
If the internet was once a safe place
to play, now we need a cyber cop on every corner, watchdogs that
guard our systems and companies dedicated to finding and defeating
threats. It's up to us to keep our eyes open, trust but verify, and
never, ever, open an email from someone you don't know or a company
you haven't done business with. I get notices, supposedly from UPS
or FedEx, about a delivery of something I didn't order, I still get
ads about Viagra, and loan offers and classes online and software of
questionable provenance and usability.
Companies that keep information about
us and hold credit card information, social security numbers, dates
of birth and such need to do a better job of safeguarding the
information. It's impossible to buy from Amazon without opening an
account. Same with most online vendors. Some places though, don't
store any information other than a username and password for your
account, no credit card records, no bank info, nothing that can tie
to your money. Sure, one-click shopping is fast, but it's not as
secure as entering your credit or debit card number manually every
time.
The most secure thing is still cash
at a physical store. It's not as convenient and maybe it's more
time-consuming, but it is safer. Some cyber-criminal can't grab the
info from the chip-enabled credit card in your wallet if you don't
carry it everywhere. And cash is welcome almost everywhere. It used
to be the case that you would check to see if they took your credit
card before buying. Now they're surprised by cash, and delighted at
the same time.
Once upon a time we used to have
something called money. Now it's all ones and zeroes in a computer
somewhere. But you can still get cash, if you really want or need
it. That isn't going away any time soon.
