I have to shake my head when I read stories about all the great credit card heists that occurred during the holidays. We’ve grown so blase and so inured to the outrageous nature of it all that we rarely even get miffed anymore when we hear about it.
Similarly the retailers, the credit card companies, and even law enforcement seem to collectively shrug their shoulders. They offer up free credit monitoring, promise that any fraudulent charges won’t damage the victims credit, issue new cards, and form new task forces to combat the online thieves.
Plastic cards are cheap to issue and the credit that these thieves made off with is not even real. It’s numbers in a databank. Numbers that can be easily readjusted after the fact.
In essence the crime won’t have happened. Maybe down the road a few careless fools will get caught and be given small prison sentences but life goes on.
It has to.
The entire house of cards that credit is built upon rests on the fact that the general populace has confidence in the banking system to “make things right”. Whatever that means. In this case some “cheap and easy” solutions.
Fundamental and long-term solutions are much harder and take longer. Solutions like redeveloping credit cards to be harder to steal, imposing sanctions on countries that seem to harbor these dens of thieves, coordinating police agencies to work with each, and changing the general public’s attitudes about how they use credit are slow hard and most of all expensive solutions.
In the meantime the problem goes merrily along.
I can’t feel too smug. I may be more careful that the average consumer. I avoid using even debit cards as much as possible, I don’t store banking information on my devices, I use prepaid cards when purchasing online and limit my personal information out there, but I could just as easily get hit by credit thieves opening credit lines in my name or hacking in and emptying my accounts.
My only safety lies in numbers. That’s the only safety anyone of us really has. I swim along with a giant school of tuna hoping that a barracuda doesn’t focus in on me and instead picks on my neighbor who’s a little slower and a little more careless.
Recent Comments