US giant Wells Fargo warns: “In today’s digital world scammers are using advanced tools like AI to make impersonation scams harder to detect. Caller ID can be spoofed, emails can be faked, voices can be cloned, and images can be altered.” This makes Wells Fargo’s current security measures vulnerable. For example, the bank uses recognition of a customer’s voice as a security check for providing access to customer service concerning a depositor’s account.
Scammers are just one problem. Hackers are another. Your identity can be stolen. Your account can be stolen. Your pension can be stolen. Your home can be stolen. Your credit card and your debit card can be hijacked. Checks you have written can be intercepted and altered. Entire systems, corporations, and government agencies can be held ransom.
And then there is “customer service.” The time-consuming struggle with an AI voice, the frustration of dealing with English language-handicapped foreign “customer service representatives” with no authority, the wait to be transferred to a supervisor, the need to go to a branch office because a previous security update erased account connections, and so on. What used to be an easily fixed problem over the telephone answered by the third ring can go on for days before being resolved.
It is going to get worse. The Internet cannot be made secure because it is an open system. Security firms tell financial firms, for example, that the best they can do is to train the company’s employees not to make mistakes that make it easy for hackers. I wonder how long before banks and financial institutions require their account holders to participate in online security courses in order for the banks to guarantee their accounts.
The big banks and the Federal Reserve might soon offer and then impose digital currency. Digital currency replaces physical means of payment such as cash and checks. The handling and managing of physical transactions is more expensive as it requires people rather than a program to manage transactions. As the five big banks control 90% of all deposits–essentially a monopoly– their adoption of digital currency would impose it on all banks.
A digital currency means your money is no longer in your hands. It can be denied you intentionally or accidentally. You no longer will have a cash hoard as a backup. Possibly, if they are permitted to exist, you could collect anonymous debit cards preloaded with specific amounts, but if digital money is to be used for control, their existence is unlikely. Moreover, hackers are as likely to be successful diverting digital money as everything else.
The main destructive element of digital systems is that they remove humans from human contact. Scammers have eliminated the usefulness of a telephone as a device for speaking to another person. Instead, people text. But if caller ID and emails can be compromised, so can texting.
What the digital revolution has given us is total insecurity, isolation, and enormous frustration. Why do we put up with it?
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