Operators of telephone services in a growing number of countries will soon be offering a service for transferring money using GSM mobile phones. This is progress for users but also presents an opportunity for criminal (or terrorist) organisations to exploit mobile phones’ security loopholes: fraud, taking control of devices that are less well protected than computers, untraceable transfers of funds, and so on.
Virtual Money Transfer and Cybercrime
In February of this year, MasterCard and the GSM Association (GSMA) announced the creation of a system to enable the transmission and receipt of international money transfers using mobile phones. Nineteen operators representing about 600 million users in 100 countries are associated with this project, for which a pilot programme has already been launched.
One of the aims of this is to enable migrant workers who do not necessarily have a bank account to be able easily to send money to their families, based on the principle that the mobile network covers the planet considerably better than does the banking network. The development potential is impressive: at the end of 2004, the GSMA represented 660 operators, serving more than 1.3 billion clients in 210 countries.
Small Sums, Major Challenges
As a comparison, and taking approximate figures, 80 per cent of the world’s population are covered by the mobile network and $230 billion worth of money transfers are already circulating throughout the world annually, primarily serving some 200 million migrant workers. The current system of international money transfer between banks or post offices is neither instantaneous nor cheap: it can cost up to 24 per cent of small sums, which are typically what a migrant worker wants to send to his family both rapidly and on an ad hoc basis.
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