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Wednesday 13 May 2020

Cashless society con – an affront to our liberty




















Society going cashless is not for your convenience. It is for the enhancement of some very powerful financial interests who have been feverishly lobbying governments to abolish your hard-earned cash.


Going cashless instantly makes us a target. Large sections of the industry want to force us to go cashless so that they can sell data on our personal shopping practices.

Big Brother is watching you and your money but he wants to know more about your personal spending habits.

When we purchase items with cash, we are anonymous, free and unrestricted. However, when we buy things with our cards, our spending habits can be tracked. Visa, Mastercard and American Express have already set up divisions to monetise this data and sell it for marketing purposes. This helps them (not you) to get richer. 

The main victims of a progressively cashless society are the poorest people and the elderly, who find their lives made ever more demanding. Many people still do not even use the internet and have little interest in doing so. Others have no wish to be forced into online banking. That is their choice and it must be protected in a fair and democratic society.

Although, at the moment, there may be some value in these times of Covid -19 pandemic of not handling cash, there is another side to that story.

The bulk of bank fraud victims have  still not been refunded, despite new anti-fraud code with one high street giant only fully paying back 1% of customers. Britain's money-grabbing banks are relying on generic warnings, making decisions not based on evidence and not properly explaining why scam victims should not be refunded, a damning review of an anti-fraud code said.


The banking industry has warned consumers to be on the lookout for an expected rise in online fraud and scam attempts that try to take advantage of the circumstances around the Covid-19 crisis.

The Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) FraudSMART campaign says people need to be extra vigilant, take their time to do relevant checks and always report suspicious activity to their bank or local Garda station immediately. It follows a rise in fraud and scam attempts under the cover of the Covid-19 pandemic in other countries, including the UK.


A few years back David Cameron’s Tory government was seriously considering turning Britain into a cashless society. One of the prime reasons mentioned was that it would allegedly help tackle criminal activity on the grounds that it is theoretically harder for criminals to handle electronic money, because it can be traced. However, countless victims of online swindles who collectively lost billions back then would earnestly disagree. 

What is therefore at risk here is our basic right to choose. Not everyone wants to open online bank accounts and it is undemocratic that they should be forced into doing so by politicians and banks that have a less than perfect history. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a diversity of ways to pay for items and retaining the vital ability to simply choose. Cheques, cash and cards have favourably existed together for decades. Moreover, there is no reason why cash cannot continue to exist alongside plastic etc.


Digital systems are not infallible, they can  and do fail. They can be subject to cyber attacks too. Cash however is always there and has been instantly trustworthy since ancient times.

Banking outlets and cash points have vanished in numerous areas and many are seeing these inconvenient moves as just more greedy corporate pressure to force us into online banking.

The choice between cash, cards and cheques will always be essential because for some people, like the most elderly and the poorest in society, going cashless simply isn't an alternative.

Bank fraud is booming

In 2014-2015, losses soared by 64% to £133.5m for online banking and 28% to £323.3m for phone banking. And yet many banks are still failing to introduce security steps that could better protect their customers from falling victim to scams.


Two-thirds of online banking systems in 2017 contained high-risk vulnerabilities

75 % of online banking systems contained cross-site scripting flaws, 69 % lacked protection from data interception, 63 % had insufficient authorisation, 50 % were vulnerable to sensitive data disclosure.



Rather than clandestinely pushing us to follow their dictatorial cashless agenda our government and banking establishment should be supporting our basic human right to choose. 

Regardless of contemporary banking spin you are provably 'not' 100%  safe online. Therefore, a draconian and profit-orientated cashless push by the establishment is primarily an affront to our traditional liberties. 













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