There’s an electronic device on my desk that looks — through its bubble- wrap — like a cheap miniature calculator. It’s still in the packaging a month after it arrived because I’m irritated by the idea that I have to master a new gadget specifically designed to complicate a familiar action. The thing is a debit-card reader, and I gather I must activate it whenever I want to send money from my bank account via the internet to a new payee. At first that was done simply by typing the payee’s details into boxes on my laptop screen; then it involved waiting for a security code to pop up on my phone, sometimes requiring a walk round the garden waving the phone to find a signal; now I must have my card and reader to hand each time, and it will probably be quicker to write a cheque and walk down to the postbox.
But then again, I’m lucky I’m not with Tesco Bank, 9,000 of whose 136,000 current account holders have just suffered a collective £17 million theft by online hackers. The customers, whether or not cheesed off like me by changing security procedures, were in no sense to blame: the money was simply drained from their accounts, and much of it seems to have been sent to Brazil, which is these days the hottest of many emerging markets for banking fraud.
Even so, some might cry caveat emptor: it serves you right if you’re foolish enough to park your cash with a supermarket that famously has black holes in its own profit–and-loss account, rather than a proper bank. But the bigger the bank, the more it may be prone to computer cock-ups too — as NatWest and RBS recently demonstrated when they had a spot of trouble with withdrawals — while major online retailers and mobile phone networks are subject to multiple daily attempts at mass theft of data.
In this respect, no trusted brand can be trusted any more: after buying a birthday bouquet from Marks & Spencer’s website a couple of months ago, I must have received a hundred fraudulent emails inviting me to claim ‘cash prizes’ from M&S, Morrisons and other temptingly reputable retail names.
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