We took the following example of a cybercrime in
Why Is It Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?
Joe uses a digital payment to buy something from Jane, and does not get what he ordered.
In this context, digital payment is any A2A RTP like UPI (India), FPS (UK) or Zelle (USA).
(For the uninitiated, A2A RTP stands for Account-to-Account Real Time Payment, where money goes from sender’s bank account to receiver’s bank account in near realtime.)
We then saw why it was hard to catch the cybercriminal.
In this second part, we will examine who is liable for cybercrime.
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Cybercrime goes beyond the anonymous nature of cash and non-anonymous nature of digital payments. That’s because:
- Cash transactions cannot happen remotely. So, Joe needs to meet Jane in person to hand over the cash to her. While cash is an anonymous MOP, Joe does know the identity of Jane. Besides, if the meeting happens in a public place, Jane is captured in many
CCTV feeds. - Digital Payment introduces many intermediaries such as Payor Bank, Payee Bank, Scheme Operator, and so on. While these entities follow the law, it’s not like laws related to this specific scam are the only laws they’re governed by.
As we can see, in the context of cybercrime, cash is not all that anonymous, and the non-anonymous nature of digital payments is not all that helpful in solving cybercrimes carried out via an A2A RTP.
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While referring to Jane, I prefixed the term “scammer” with “alleged”. That’s because of…
