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.
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2020/0331/1127574-banks-issue-warning-about-covid-19-scam-attempts/
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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