ATMIA Publishes Cash Versus Card: Relative Security and Victim Impact from Attacks Study

ATMIA today published a new international study “Cash versus Card—Relative Security and Victim Impact from Attacks” to analyze the comparative nature of cash crime versus card crime.

“After analysing three years of crime reports directly targeting cash and those targeting non-cash payment instruments such as cards, it became very clear that there is no such thing as a victimless crime,” commented author of the report, international ATM security expert, Douglas Russell. “I found that the sheer scale in number of victims impacted and with financial losses frequently well into the millions, the more technological attacks targeting cards and electronic deposits tends to overshadow the less sophisticated attacks directly targeting cash…”

ATMIA commissioned the study following on-going attempts by the anti-cash lobby to link cash and crime, while failing to represent the magnitude of losses associated with many incidents of card and data fraud.

“This is a fair and balanced paper by a highly respected security analyst,” said Mike Lee, CEO of ATMIA. “He has analysed actual reported incidents to compare the scale of losses for cash crimes and card and data crimes, assessing the impacts of low-value, medium-value and high-value losses within each broad category. As the Cyber Age gathers steam, it’s inevitable that fraud targeting electronic data and value will increase in relation to more physical type attacks on cash, and that the gap between the kind of losses suffered in the two types of attack will continue to widen.”