Crime, whether we like it or not, is a driving force behind a large proportion of technological ‘progress’. In 1817, a burglary at a British dockyard led the government to start a competition, challenging locksmiths to invent an unpickable lock. The result was the Chubb detector lock, and it remained ‘unpicked’ for 33 years.
In the past, adding another lock, or increasing the wall thickness of a safe was the obvious solution to deter theft. However, money is no longer physical, it is now predominantly a data set shared via telecommunications, secured via encryption, transacted via smartphone or exchanged into V-bucks. As our money becomes completely electronic, new crimes will undoubtedly be committed, which take advantage of the technology itself or the social conventions on which it rests. Perhaps if we could imagine what crimes might happen, we could start to think about how to prevent them.
What financial crimes could be committed within a completely electronic marketplace?
