Prepaid Card - "Touch and Go" "Smart Tag" ( Week 5 )

Prepaid card is far from a new idea. A prepaid card looks like a credit or debit card, and gives users the ability to purchase products and services with a card but with a crucial difference - you can only spend the balance that has been preloaded onto the card. This means there is no risk of running into debt as it has no credit or overdraft facility. Examples of a prepaid card in our country are the “Touch and Go”.

Touch and Go or another more advanced card for travel the Smart Tag which is a type of credit card that are widely use by Malaysian. “PLUS” highway has come out with this service in order to convenience user during traveling. Money can be loaded on to a prepaid card by cash at a bank, Post Office, or even by another credit card. The function of touch and go is that user may pay for the highway toll faster by just tab on the card on the sensor to direct credit the toll amount. This may reduce traffic jam on the highway.

Smart Tag is another prepaid card that is slightly advanced than touch and go. You don’t have to even stop in order to pay the tolls. There is a mechanical device where you just insert the touch and go card there and place it on top of the front dash box. Whenever you paying the toll, all you have to do is just drive through the toll. The device in your car will directly connect with the sensor means that the payment is credited.

Credit Card Debts : Causes and Prevention (week 5)

A Credit Card is a system of payment named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. In the case of credit cards, the issuer lends money to the consumer to be paid later to the merchant. It is different from a charge card, which requires the balance to be paid in full each month. In contrast, a credit card allows the consumer to 'revolve' their balance, at the cost of having interest charged. Most credit cards are issued by local banks or Credit Unions, and are the same shape and size, as specified by the ISO 7810 standard.

Credit card debt is an example of unsecured consumer debt, accessed through ISO 7810 plastic credit cards. Debt results when a client of a credit card company purchases an item or service through the card system. Debt accumulates and increases via interest and penalties when the consumer does not pay the company for the money he or she has spent. When a consumer

has been late on a payment, it is possible that other creditors, even creditors the consumer was not late in paying, may increase the interest rates the consumer is paying. This practice is called universal default.

Causes
Sometimes the late fees, high Annual Percentage Rate (APRs), and universal default overcome consumers who frequently do not pay off their debt, and the customer declares bankruptcy. If a customer files for bankruptcy, the credit card companies are required to forgive all or much of the debt, unless such discharge of debt is successfully challenged by one or more creditors, or blocked by a bankruptcy judge on legal grounds irrespective of creditors' challenges.

Prevention

The best way to get rid of debt, experts agree, is to attack the balance with the highest annual percentage rate first. When that one is paid off, move onto the debt with the next-highest interest rate.

"The amount you owe doesn't really matter when you're paying an enormous amount of interest," "Try to pay the highest interest rate ones first. Muster all the funds available and get the debt out of your life."

Electronic Currency (week 5)

Electronic Currency or known as Electronic money that included e-money, electronic cash, digital money, digital cash or digital currency which refers to money or scrip which is exchanged only electronically. Typically, this involves use of computer networks, the internet and digital stored value systems. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and direct deposit are examples of electronic money. Also, it is a collective term for financial cryptography and technologies enabling it.

Technically electronic or digital money is a system of debits to exchange value, within another system. Also sometimes the term electronic money is used to refer to the provider itself. Many systems will sell their electronic currency directly to the end user, such as Paypal and WebMoney, but other systems, such as e-gold, sell only through third party digital currency exchangers.

The main focuses of digital cash development are being able to use it through a wider range of hardware such as secured credit cards. Followed by, linking bank accounts that would generally be used over an internet means, for exchange with a secure micropayment system such as in large corporations (PayPal).

Although digital cash can provide many benefits such as convenience and privacy, increased efficiency of transactions, lower transaction fees, and new business opportunities with the expansion of economic activities on the Internet, there are many potential issues with the use of digital cash. The transfer of digital currencies raises local issues such as how to levy taxes or the possible ease of money laundering. There are also potential macroeconomic effects such as exchange rate instabilities and shortage of money supplies (total amount of digital cash versus total amount of real cash available, basically the possibility that digital cash could exceed the real cash available). These issues may only be addressable by some type of cyberspace regulations or laws that regulate the transactions and watch for signs of trouble.

For more infomation. Please visit http://www.wikipedia.org/

Mobile Payment Systems in Malaysia (week 5)

Introduction

Mobile payment also may refer to as mobile web payment or WAP billing. It is the collection of money from a consumer via a mobile device such as their Mobile Phone, Smart Phone, Personal Digital Assistant or known as PDA and many more. There are lots of stuff can be purchased through mobile payment. For example, Music, videos, ring tones, games, wallpapers and other digital goods.

In Malaysia, http://www.ecapay.com/ is well known online payment gateway which facilitates Malaysian domestic payment. With Malaysia Direct Debit we provide direct access to Malaysia’s domestic direct debit (online banking) pay-ments. Ecapay currently supports Hong Leong Bank, Public Bank, CIMB(Bank Bumiputra Commerce, Bank Islam, Maybank and Pospay. For more information please visit : -

http://www.ecapay.com/article7.html?gclid=CPa2kcu0iJQCFQdIegodkSdUXA

For further information, there are two primary types of mobile payments which is the older type of transaction payment which is the Premium SMS based transactional payments and now already advanced to the Mobile Web payments (WAP)

Potential

The Mobile Web payment allowed consumers to uses web pages displayed on their mobile phone to make a payment. This process is quickly replacing premium SMS based transactional payments for digital content and also enables the sale of physical goods. Using a familiar web payment model gives a number of proven benefits of such as flow on sales, high customer satisfaction and yet easy to use.

Consumer adoption strategies

Mobile payments are commonly expected to increase consumer convenience by reducing the need for coins and cash in small transactions and increasing the availability of purchase possibilities. Consumer chooses to make a mobile payment. They interact with the payment server using their mobile device to authenticate or authorize the payment. They are subsequently presented with status showing confirmation of the successful transaction or failure with a reason. Extensions to this include Near Field Communications or Contact less Payment options using additional hardware built into the mobile phone. Few researches has made where teenagers from 14-15 years old, young adults where they have entered working life and most of them are in their twenties and middle aged members of a hobby group where most of them are between 50-59 years old.

Review on My E-Commerce blog (week 4)

After reviewing http://ecommerze.blogspot.com/search/label/Internet%20Security I realize that how dangerous computer viruses and the different types of viruses may have different type of threat to our computer. According to the sites, among 130mil population internet user in China there one million of them got infected by viruses.

We should be proud that our Malaysian government has spend an amount of RM43 million to set up an International Multinational Partnership against Cyber terrorism. This centre offers the world best brain and facilities to help fight cyber security threat by eliminating viruses that roaming in the internet in our country.

On the other hand, Spamming is also one of the internet threats where its function is flooding of electronic mail systems with “junk e-mail”. Also known as unsolicited bulk messages sent through the electronic messaging systems. There are various types of spam such as PDF Spam, Piggyback Spam, and Greeting Card Spam where each of them pays a different role of their own.
Downloading movies or even mp3 in the internet may cause a threat because you may invite unwanted hackers hack into your computers. For example, one of the military pentagons was hacked and taken of 1500 emails account offline. After the incident, the US military band using e-mail anymore. Not only PC, mobile phone also is a victim Malware or known as mobile malicious software that act like a virus attack in your mobile phone.

In conclusion, we should use the internet wisely in order to prevent virus attack. Install a reliable anti virus software.

Safeguarding your Personal and Financial Data (week4)

Since that E-Commerce has been a very popular and convenient way for users, Internet users nowadays are lack on confident by revealing their personal data online, this has been a barrier to them. No worries, I have successfully found out a website that may solve your problems. http://www.onlinebackupvault.com/. This program is the one source for secure reliable online offsite data backup storage. The web was designed to be user friendly by utilizing simple but extremely powerful backup software allowing easy backups and easy restores. This site is subdivided to two types of protection which are the business services and residential services.

The business services are one source for online, offsite, secure data backup. It provides an easy automated encrypted solution for backing up all your data servers and workstation. The packages include software clients for virtually al server operating systems and server applications. Besides that, it also offers unlimited retention dates that allowed business user to hold in storage as many revisions of files as you would like.

As for the residential service, it include a plans named “Smart Search” technology which automatically backups all your files including my documents desktop and also internet favorites. A new technology “Dailintomypc” that may remotely connect to your computer and assist you in selecting your files that you would like to backup as well as show you how to view your backup logs.

Phishing. Example and Prevention (week 4)

There are 2 types of phishing. One is the Phishing Attacks and the other one is the Spear-Phishing Attacks. A simple explanation about phishing is that there are a numbers of fake online website that tries to lure online users to leak out their personal data and password, especially the credit card number.

Many have been solicited by fake eBay and Citibank requests for additional personal information. Research has found that there are occasional an e-mail from eBay advising user to update their account. There is a click button of right-click and View Source on the e-mail send and whenever you click it will link you to the other destination rather than eBay sites. This is one of the techniques that use by the phisher to hope that they will lure users with the threat of their account being closed or worse, hoping that they will provide their personal information.

There are several ways to prevent phishing which is through education. Gain additional knowledge on how to suspect corporate e-mail, even if it comes from a reliable authority. For example a company can hire security experts to spear-phish their own organization by looking for weak links and educating employees. Companies also can stop sending out links within IT, HR, and accounting-related e-mail rather than refer employees to an intranet, password-protected home page. Companies should also use secure Web forms rather than e-mail to transact personal information such as social security numbers and the like.

http://www.cnet.com/