Electronic transactions have their place and can be useful in searching out and buying things online and are often the only way to make such purchases. However, they are not necessary for anything else, and the drawbacks of electronic transactions are becoming increasingly apparent; furthermore, their alleged convenience is turning out to be partly illusionary or outweighed by their disadvantages.
Consider the unreliability of individual electronic transactions –
And their insecurity –
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/card-fraud-rise
And their expensiveness –
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/sneaky-way-aussies-ripped-off-015400037.html
And their lack of privacy –
And the lack of robustness, and vulnerability to failure, of the electronic systems themselves (due to system outages, power failures, extreme weather events, etc) –
Considering all this, it is worth examining whether electronic payment systems are overall as convenient as many people seem to assume.
My wife often uses her card to make online purchases, and while she is usually able to find and buy online whatever she needs, we have literally lost count of the number of times her account has been scammed or its security compromised (probably at least half a dozen times in the last couple of years). Every time this happens, she needs to phone the bank, report the fraudulent transaction or security breach, have her card cancelled and a new one ordered, wait for the new card to arrive in the mail before making any more card transactions, and then contact all the organisations that deduct money from her account for recurrent payments, to update her card details in their records. All this is a real bother. Fortunately, the account is dedicated mainly just to recurrent deductions and online purchases, and she only keeps enough money in the account for those immediate payments, so losses have been minimal, although she has had money stolen from the account several times.
And if one makes a lot of payments by card or internet transfer, to keep track of them all one really needs to check one’s monthly bank statement as soon as it is issued, verify a myriad of transactions, dispute any excessive payments, and report any fraudulent transactions. I do not see this as being convenient either.
While it is recommended to keep card usage to a minimum, if one needs to make online purchases, the safest way to do so is to have an account dedicated to this purpose and keeping only minimal funds in it. I would suggest also having a different account, preferably not connected online and with a cheque facility, and writing cheques from it for large payments and for remote payments that do not need to be made online, and using physical cash for all other in-person payments. The safest way to top-up the online account is to deposit a cheque in it from the cheque account. In this way, and by minimising card usage, we can keep online exposure and therefore risk, to a minimum, and above all keep accounts with the largest sums of money isolated from online scams and electronic theft.
Should one need to keep track of one’s transactions in real time, one can always use a notepad to jot down the details of each transaction as it is made.
Australians lose billions of dollars a year to online scams and electronic theft. Many of the scams aim to gain access to people’s bank accounts by compromising online security –
My son uses online banking, and once $2500, which was most of the account’s contents, simply vanished from his account.
Companies and organisations may find it worth their while to have online banking, but due to the increasing prevalence and sophistication of online scams, it is worthwhile for the average person to ask themselves “Do I really need online banking?”, and “Is there really much that I can’t do by using physical cash, cheques and where necessary, online card payments?”. A bank account that is not connected to the internet is considerably safer than one that is. Without online banking one can still use a card for online payments, and if necessary for in-person purchases (although the more a card is used the greater the risk). The online world is treacherous, and no one is too smart to be scammed -
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-youre-never-too-smart-to-get-scammed-233106460.html
Please continue to share the petition with others who may be interested in retaining cheque payments in Australia:
https://www.change.org/save-cheques
Thankyou.
David Miller.