Thought tap to pay was just a gimmick until my card got skimmed at a gas station in Tulsa
I was dead set against going cashless for 2 years because I figured cards were just as easy to steal from. Then someone cloned my debit card at a pump off I-44 and drained $340 before I even got home. Now I use tap to pay everywhere and my phone warns me about weird charges in seconds, so who's actually footing the bill when the system fails?
The umbrella thing is spot on, but it goes even deeper. Think about how crooks already figured out chip cards and just moved to skimming or straight up online scams instead. When stores stopped taking checks, fraud didn't vanish, it just slid over to wire transfers and gift cards. Crooks follow the weakest link, not the type of payment. So yeah, arguing about cash vs cards misses the whole point, the real fix is making the weak link harder to find.