Cash And Crime

Dateline: Woking, 10th October 2024.Do you think that getting rid of cash will reduce crime or increase it? We can look at Scandinavia for indicators, since there are a great many people in Scandinavia who cannot remember when they last used cash. Cash-related crimes such as bank robbery are down (twenty years ago Denmark had 200 bank robberies per annum, last year it had none) as is tax evasion. The Swedish black market appears to have contracted, just as cashless campaigner Bjorn (from ABBA) and others had hoped.Share In the future, everyone will be famous for 15MbDifferent Kinds Of CrimeThe presence of cash means the presence of criminals and many of them are violent. Not only guns, but all sorts of weapons. This guy did not smash his car through the doors of a grocery store in England to threaten staff and demand credit card receipts. He demanded cash.(It’s not a purely English problem. There were nearly 900 robberies using a vehicle as a weapon in the US in 2022.)In largely cashless Sweden, online crime has surged, with criminals taking more than $100m in 2023 through a variety of scams. Does this $100m make Sweden a “high crime” country as the article implies? No, it does not. I would think that Swedish citizens are more concerned about violent gang warfare and a tripling of the murder rate, but for comparison according to UK Finance the equivalent scams in the UK were well over $1 billion back in 2022.While cash attracts…Cash And Crime