advertisement
advertisement

A Money Transport Device With A Sensor That Could Destroy Your Cash. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Written by Evan Schuman
January 31st, 2011

How confident are you in technology? How would you feel about a product that, if it glitches, destroys all of the cash that you’re trying to send to your bank? Wincor-Nixdorf has crafted just such a product. What could possibly go wrong?

The idea is to have a more secure cash drum, one that would destroy all of the money it’s holding if anyone attempts to steal that money. It uses special ink and the vendor says “the money will be stained for more than 20 percent of the surface. It is impossible to undo the staining.”

Can you imagine the fun meeting with your bank or insurance people—or your CFO—and explaining how an IT glitch just destroyed money coming from a store? Wincor-Nixdorf assures IT that “the concept is designed in a way that a mishandling is not possible and, therefore, the risk of mis-triggerings is reduced to a minimum.” A minimum, eh? Quite comforting. Who pays for the lost money if it glitches?

The transport mechanism has two ways of protecting (or destroying) your money: a drum, which moves the money from the POS to the back office in the store and uses a timer to decide if the money is moving too slowly and needs to be obliterated; and a cash cassette, which goes from the back office to the cash center and uses sensors to try and detect unauthorized access.

The idea to add extra security to money transport is a good one, but what if the timer malfunctions? What if an employee gets distracted in mid transport and the timer runs out? It seems a risky—and unusually unforgiving—mechanism. An awful lot is riding on these technology systems, not to mention your employee’s processes, working perfectly. Something about allowing a timer to permanently destroy cash seems like a bad idea.


advertisement

2 Comments | Read A Money Transport Device With A Sensor That Could Destroy Your Cash. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

  1. PCI Guy Says:

    The US Treasury will replace damaged currency, so inadvertent activation would be a nuisance, but not a catastrophe.
    http://www.moneyfactory.gov/damagedcurrencyclaim.html

  2. Evan Schuman Says:

    Editor’s Note: Thanks, PCI Guy. Just read those requirements and procedures. Catastrophe? Jury’s out on that (depends on how much money is involved), but those requirements move this WAY beyond nuisance.

Newsletters

StorefrontBacktalk delivers the latest retail technology news & analysis. Join more than 60,000 retail IT leaders who subscribe to our free weekly email. Sign up today!
advertisement

Most Recent Comments

Why Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?

I am still unclear about the core point here-- why higher value of European cards. Supply and demand, yes, makes sense. But the fact that the cards were chip and pin (EMV) should make them less valuable because that demonstrably reduces the ability to use them fraudulently. Did the author mean that the chip and pin cards could be used in a country where EMV is not implemented--the US--and this mis-match make it easier to us them since the issuing banks may not have as robust anti-fraud controls as non-EMV banks because they assumed EMV would do the fraud prevention for them Read more...
Two possible reasons that I can think of and have seen in the past - 1) Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code. 2) Also, in offline chip countries the card determines whether or not a transaction is approved, not the issuer. In my experience, European issuers haven't developed the same checks on authorization requests as US issuers. So, these cards might be more valuable because they are more likely to get approved. Read more...
A smart card slot in terminals doesn't mean there is a reader or that the reader is activated. Then, activated reader or not, the U.S. processors don't have apps certified or ready to load into those terminals to accept and process smart card transactions just yet. Don't get your card(t) before the terminal (horse). Read more...
The marketplace does speak. More fraud capacity translates to higher value for the stolen data. Because nearly 100% of all US transactions are authorized online in real time, we have less fraud regardless of whether the card is Magstripe only or chip and PIn. Hence, $10 prices for US cards vs $25 for the European counterparts. Read more...
@David True. The European cards have both an EMV chip AND a mag stripe. Europeans may generally use the chip for their transactions, but the insecure stripe remains vulnerable to skimming, whether it be from a false front on an ATM or a dishonest waiter with a handheld skimmer. If their stripe is skimmed, the track data can still be cloned and used fraudulently in the United States. If European banks only detect fraud from 9-5 GMT, that might explain why American criminals prefer them over American bank issued cards, who have fraud detection in place 24x7. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk
Our apologies. Due to legal and security copyright issues, we can't facilitate the printing of Premium Content. If you absolutely need a hard copy, please contact customer service.