Setting Digital Wallet Tap Limits
Digital wallets promised to end our reliance on cash but are they becoming easy pickings for fraudsters?
The pay-to-go experience is convenient, especially as institutions integrate the technology into their payment systems and banks launch card taps and virtual payment apps that allow purchases with a single tap. However, there’s an indisputable risk involved: losing your hard-earned money to cybercriminals.
Let’s take a look at how cashless payments can be exploited by criminals and how you can set digital wallet tap limits to stay safe.
Don’t let fraudsters raid your digital wallet
South Africa continues to transition from a cash-based economy to one that uses contactless payment solutions. The great hope for this technology was that paying with a single tap would remove the need to carry cash and reduce the risk of losing cash to criminals.
Unfortunately, local criminals have been getting creative and finding ways to steal digital money as well as the paper variety.
A typical scenario resulting in fraud using services like Apple Pay is as follows:
Waiting in line for your goods to be rung up by the cashier, you take out your phone and prepare your payment app for a single payment. You think you’ve done just that, but after you leave the shop, it turns out that you’ve paid for both your item and somebody else’s – and that person is already long gone.
Criminals are finding ingenious ways to trick customers into tapping twice, sometimes with the help of employees who are in on the scam. This is especially worrying because many banks set relatively high automatic limits on contactless payments – with R10 000 being fairly common.
If criminals manage to gain access to your tap and go device, they could drain your account in an hour or less, and it’s even easier when you are using the card tap functionality.
How to use contactless payment services and lower your risk
- Reduce your payment limits. Most customers will find that R 1000 to R2 000 per transaction should be sufficient to pay for small purchases.
- Receive instant notifications and wait for them. Don’t leave the counter until you’ve received a notification of the amount that has been deducted.
- Watch out for suspicious transactions. If you notice a payment that you didn’t make or multiple payments of the same amount, contact your bank immediately to stop your card.
- Disable the tap functionality on your card. Certain banks allow customers to disable the card tap function which can then only be used when you insert it into the machine and enter a PIN.
A holistic approach to online security has become essential as criminals find new and creative ways to steal both money and data. Our range of secure cloud storage solutions will help keep your business information safely encrypted. Browse our range of packages to secure your valuable files today.