Smart Phones and credit cards – I’m sur…

Smart Phones and credit cards – I’m sure someone is already thinking of this or doing this… but it would seem like a smart phone with GPS capability would be a great way to end credit card fraud. When a merchant tries to put through a charge (say a Chinese restaurant 1000 miles away from where you live), a message could be pushed to the smart phone: “Merchant X wants to charge $x dollars to your account – do you approve?” This all happens in real time (more or less). When you click OK, it records the GPS coordinates of the phone. It returns control to the customer, not the guestimate of a fraud detection algorithm. Maybe eventually the entire model gets turned on its head – you pay for a meal by using your cell phone to initiate the payment to the merchant, who gets the message pushed to them…. “the customer at table 17 just deposited $50.00 in your merchant account”…. and without fraud, the fees for doing this type of transaction should be negligible compared to today’s Visa/Mastercard fees