Cash-less society can costs us a lot

Hey everyone, just wanted to share a story with you, so a week or so ago my banks blocked my accounts literally both of my bank accounts were blocked for 3 days because I moved some money between them and due to antimoney laundering regulations they blocked them. It was one of my worst experiences so far in regards of banking, on an early Friday afternoon I got text messages from both of my banks stating that my accounts have been suspended for sercurity purposes until further notice and that I have to contact them.

Obviously I gave them a call just to figure out that I moved a larger amount of money between the accounts which is not usual so they suspended my accounts until they can confirm that the money is coming from legit sources (from my broker account), so imagine it has happened on a Friday early afternoon and I’ve been told that it will take a couple of days for them to investigate the source of the funds, which really upset me, this department of the bank works only during weekdays so I have to wait till next Monday and there I am without any money for the weekend.

I scraped together for like £20.00 cash from here and there and shopped the essentials cause happened to ran out of food too, gladly I had my freezer almost full and some staples in the cupboards, but still felt super uncomfortable cause I did not want to borrow money from my family or friends, to be fair I felt pretty embarassed and felt vulnerable, I didn’t do anything wrong, yet I found myself in this misery.

Used to think about being cashless as a society is a very deserible goal in the long run, well as you can figure it out I quickly changed my mind on this topic. There are major drawbacks in going cashless such as what happens to people whom are being locked out of their accounts, so it’s not that they don’t have available funds, it’s more of a don’t have access to their accounts issue.

What cashless societies will do in case of a cyber attack, we don’t even have to go back too long in history to find an example in 2007 there were cyber attacks on Estonia, an entire nation fall victim of cyber attacks where they blocked the parliament’s website, voting site, newschannels, newspapers, broadcasters, ministries, banks, utility providers were attacked and flooded with pishing messages. The life basically stopped for days.

Another case could be the case of China where the enemies of the political regime are being restricted, they can’t buy travel tickets from one province to another, cash is no longer well seen there and with the cashless system in place they can monitor the citizens better.

It is a very dangerous route to go down on, obviously there are advantages such as the stores are less likely being raided, robbed as they won’t store physical cash.

To store cash is also comes with a cost, but the question should be more like do we want the system to know all of our steps, to be monitored whenever we make a transaction, the shops also can sell our data, even though it must be protected under the GDPR regulations in Europe, but can we be sure about it? I don’t think so, the tech giants and credit card companies are collecting data about us, they know us and our behaviour better most times than we do know it ourselves.

What’s gonna happen to cashless societies if the internet goes down? What’s gonna happen to cashless societies if there’s a power outage, which is pretty common on certain parts of the world from Latin American countries through Caribbeans or Asians, there could be a typhoon, earthquake or all sorts of natural disasters and being cashless would place the societies in a vulnerable situation in general.

I think Europe and the world shouldn’t follow the suite of countries like China or Sweden that pursue a cashless dream, we should find the balance between both systems and coexist. I can tell for sure it was a scary 3 days for me and felt very vulnerable, lesson learned and will always keep some cash at home for emergencies, that’s the major take away from it. I would recommend for you too to keep some cash in hand in case of emergencies., stay safe ya’ll.

Your sincerely

To/Minimal