Recently, a study called “It’s In Your Hands” has revealed that the total transactions made by consumers has reached £6.4bn a week, reaching a peak of £1bn a day of money being transferred through only digital means in the UK alone. And, in the current climate of hacking scandal after hacking scandal, is it really wise of consumers to be putting so much faith into the internet?
It turns out that an amazing number of people are relying on technology to manage their money, with 7 million log ins a day are made to online banking services, and what if just one happened to be on a network which had a hacker on it? Or if you had a key logger on your computer? This could have disastrous consequences for you, as it could potentially give a hacker access to a lot of your money.
Another form of technology based payment is contactless payment, or NFC. This is a low-cost method of paying for shopping or car parking without needing to use money or get out your card – all you need is an NFC enabled smartphone or bank card. But what if you lose your phone? No, the thief wouldn’t be able to access your bank details. But would they? It turns out that they would. As recently revealed, it is possible to trick an NFC bank card into giving out all the details of the card and/or the account it is linked to by using a smartphone and reverse engineering it. This means that if you walk past someone with one of these devices in their pocket, they would then be able to use your card online to buy things and effectively scam you out of a lot of money. And your bank probably wouldn’t protect you from it as there is no proof it wasn’t you who bought these items.
In conclusion, internet banking has many risks but it is still growing with an amazing rate, with only 10% of all transactions reckoned to actually be made in branch this year, compared to 24%last year. And, it seems, there is no fighting progress.
