The other night I was watching TV when five SMS notifications appeared on my phone. I ignored them at first because of all the spam I receive on a daily basis, but something made me look at them and there they were, purchases debited to my card at some international fast-food chain. I phoned my bank’s fraud line, stopped the credit card and opened a fraud investigation case. Long story short, I was refunded most of the money. The problem here is that I am paranoid about my card being cloned but fraudsters still managed to do it. I have also been receiving more fraudulent calls from people pretending to be my banker in recent months, as well as emails requesting sensitive information.
We all know people who have been taken to the cleaners by conmen, promising fantastic returns on investments and sweet-talking them into schemes like fractional ownership in airplanes and coffee shops. In these cases we can lay at least some of the blame on them for being ignorant or greedy, but being robbed by a fraudster just using your bank card to buy groceries leaves a very bad taste in your mouth. The most obvious solution to this problem is to never give any sensitive information to anybody asking for it. You can also go one step further and load all your bank cards on the “wallet” on your phone and just tap your phone when paying. This will prevent anybody from cloning your card with some strip reader. I have gone even further and created a virtual card, linked to my credit cards, which makes payments even more safe.
The problem we face is that there are people out there who understand the systems way better than we do and they can make a lot of money without doing much work. We are entering a world where you can get paid a sign-on bonus by a company that will create generational wealth for you, like we have just seen in the case between Meta (Facebook) and OpenAI. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI claims that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is offering OpenAI employees $100 million sign-on bonuses and even larger annual packages to jump ship.
As technology advances, it makes life better for all of us but at the same time more dangerous. AI can now assist doctors in establishing how severe brain injuries are before operating. At the same time, AI can enable people with no formal training in biology to carry out advanced, potentially dangerous procedures to create biological weapons. We all have to step up and educate ourselves about how we can protect our investments from falling prey to cyber criminals. Cash in your bank account is probably the easiest thing for criminals to steal, so enable two-factor identification, create a virtual credit card on your phone and tap that for payments, and put any excess cash into your portfolio at JWR where things are highly regulated and very difficult to steal.