Friday’s Food for Thought: The Power of the All Mighty Dollar

Welcome to our weekly Friday’s Food for Thought post. Often we like to take an alternative (some would say “enlightening”) view on many of the identity theft, cyber security and data breach topics that we cover on an ongoing basis. This week, we try to analyze the core of why people commit fraud: the easy and nefarious pursuit of the all mighty dollar. It all comes down to money. And why is that?

According to an interesting blog called Currency History, “In all the history of the world currency evolution is marked with lots of changes. First of all we were trading with commodity money. Many cultures around the world eventually developed the use of commodity money. Ancient China and Africa used cowrie shells. Trade in Japan’s feudal system was based on the koku – a unit of rice per year. The shekel was an ancient unit of weight and currency. The first usage of the term came from Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC and referred to a specific weight of barley, which related other values in a metric such as silver, bronze, copper etc. A barley/shekel was originally both a unit of currency and a unit of weight.”

So, as human beings, we have been using currency for a very long time. This actually begs the question…then has there always been crime and fraud aimed at bilking others out of their hard-earned cash? The answer is yes. Check out our ID theft history contest we did last year here. And, check out this article about the Fraud Museum.

So, what does this tell us about the future of fighting fraud? It’s going to be an uphill battle because financial fraud was is and always will be around. What do you all think?