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Peoples money gets stolen everyday, and its very easy to do so with paper money. But with online money, even if someone does steal from your bank account you can track it.

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By Kevin Deutsch
Through our joint effort with the Broward Sheriff's Office to share updates to residents is a summary of Tamarac crime and arrests through January 17, 2022.
Auto Theft
Rock Island Rd.

On 1/11/2022, a 57-year-old female reported her white Infiniti Q50 stolen.
Battery
NW 58th Ct.

On 1/11/2022, a 42-year-old female was the victim of domestic battery.
Burglary Conveyance
Solandra Ln.

On 1/15/2022, a 27-year-old female reported her 2020 Nissan Rogue burglarized. Her 1.5-carat wedding ring, checkbook, Fendi glasses, and cash were stolen from the vehicle. The vehicle was processed for latent fingerprints. Tot. Est. Loss: $5,929.

Gate Lake Rd.

On 1/11/2022, a 41-year-old female was the victim of Burglary Conveyance. The complainant called to report a delayed burglary to her black Ford Explorer.

NW 57th St.

On 1/11/2022, a 34-year-old female was the victim of Burglary Conveyance. An unknown person entered her white 2015 Toyota Highlander and stole a small pocketbook.
Criminal Mischief
NW 72nd Ave.

On 1/11/2022, a 58-year-old man reported that an unidentified person threw a rock through the front window of his residence.
Information
W. Commercial Blvd.

On 1/12/2022, a Broward Sheriff's Office deputy was conducting routine maintenance when they accidentally discharged their assigned Taser.
Theft
N. Belfort Cir.

On 1/13/2022, a 73-year-old female became the victim of Theft when an unknown person accessed her safe, stole money, and replaced the stolen cash with fake paper money. Tot Est. Loss: $17,700.
Arrests
Lyons, Henry Lee, 41, was arrested on charges of Battery-commit Domestic Battery by Strangulation on NW 58th Ct. on 1/11/2022.

Jones, Eonie, 18, was arrested on charges of Larc-petit theft on W. Commercial Blvd. on 1/12/2022.

Davidson Guillams, Minkah Tor, 28, was arrested on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon-dating violence on NW 70th Ave. on 1/13/2022.

Author Profile

Kevin Deutsch

Kevin Deutsch is an award-winning crime journalist and author. A graduate of Florida International University, Kevin has worked on staff at The Miami Herald, New York Daily News, and The Palm Beach Post.

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Tamarac Crime Update: $17,700 in Cash Stolen From Safe, Replaced With Fake Money * Tamarac Talk

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By Kevin Deutsch Through our joint effort with the Broward Sheriff's Office to share updates to residents is a summary of Tamarac crime and arrests through January 17, 2022. Auto Theft Rock Island Rd. On 1/11/2022, a 57-year-old female reported her white Infiniti Q50 stolen. Battery NW 58th Ct.

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This article states that paper money is anonymous so it cannot be tracked as easily as online money.

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Governments like electronic money payment systems that they can monitor, such as credit cards, but they don't like nongovernment created electronic monies and payment systems that they find difficult to monitor like bitcoin. So, predictably, last week the IRS ruled that bitcoin is not money, thus the users must report the capital gain and loss against the U.S. dollar for each transaction made with bitcoins. Even with advanced software, an individual who might use bitcoins for the purchase of many goods and services will find trying to comply with the IRS an accounting nightmare.

Some 15 years ago, I wrote a book forecasting the demise of paper currency. I expected paper currency to gradually disappear like paper checks have. However, I was wrong. Rather than disappearing, the demand for paper currency is rising faster than inflation or population, albeit not by much, but the total quantity of paper U.S. dollars in circulation is roughly double what it was a dozen years ago. The question is: Why?

One reason given for the decline in street crime is that individuals and small merchants tend to carry less paper cash on their person as they rely more and more on the various forms of electronic payment systems - thus reducing the supply of easy‐​to‐​steal paper currency by petty criminals.

Yet, at the same time, paper‐​currency balances per person are rising rapidly, which means that most people are keeping larger and larger cash hoards at their homes or offices, or elsewhere.

Despite its considerable drawbacks, paper currency has a couple of very important advantages over other forms of money. It is anonymous - meaning you can keep your spending confidential - which almost all people like to do at times, both for good and bad reasons. Most electronic money must be held by a third‐​party custodian - such as a bank, merchant, or cellphone company, and hence is easily liable to seizure by government agencies or other electronically sophisticated miscreants.

In an age where the IRS and various other government agencies have "asset‐​forfeiture" powers, they can seize bank accounts before one is convicted of any wrongdoing. Therefore, people have a real and justified fear of having all of their cash in the bank.

The global anti‐​money laundering police with their ever increasing "know‐​your‐​customer regulations" have made it much more expensive for banks and other financial institutions to provide basic financial services, such as checking and savings accounts. As the costs of servicing each account rises because of government regulations, banks understandably require larger and larger minimum balances and more and more documentation from each customer, all of which causes a reduction in the number of potential customers who meet the new requirements.

Those who cannot meet the new requirements (most often, the young and the poor) go unbanked. Without a bank account, people cannot get credit cards.

Obtaining airline tickets, hotel rooms, auto rentals, etc., is most difficult for those who do not have bank accounts and bank‐​issued credit cards. By necessity, those without bank accounts are driven into the cash economy, where their paper currency is hard to protect and often stolen.

Politicians and regulators love to grandstand about how their regulations are preventing tax evasion, money laundering, drug dealing and terrorist finance. In fact, many studies show that most of the regulations are ineffective and only serve to benefit those who write the regulations, compliance officers in financial firms, lawyers, accountants and, of course, the politicians who extort campaign contributions from those who are regulated.

The truth of the matter is that those who come up with the regulations are responsible for more diseases being spread (from paper currency), more people being robbed, higher costs and fewer services for everyone who uses financial services, and a more difficult and dangerous life for the poor and the young.

The rise in the use of paper currencies is a direct result of overly intrusive and abusive government. If governments were benevolent and respected individual property and privacy, most paper currency would disappear - and that would be all to the good.

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Governments like electronic money payment systems that they can monitor, such as credit cards, but they don't like nongovernment created electronic monies and payment systems that they find difficult to monitor like bitcoin. So, predictably, last week the IRS ruled that bitcoin is not money, thus the users must report the capital gain and loss against the U.S.

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Paper money is hassle, its annoying to count your money and then take it out of your wallet. But with online money people can transfer the amount of money they want instantly.

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Cash is no longer king, according to more and more consumers.

Fewer and fewer adults are using printed or minted U.S. currency at all any more. About 3 in 10 Americans said they make no purchases with cash in a typical week, up from a quarter in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the share who said that all or nearly all of their purchases are made using cash fell to 18 percent from 24 percent in 2015.

In a survey of more than 2,000 Americans, U.S. Bank found that 50 percent of respondents said they carry cash with them less than half of the time they are out. When they do carry the green, 76 percent said they keep less than $50 on hand and nearly half have less than $20.

Not surprisingly, millennials are paving the way among people ditching bills and coins in favor of credit, debit and digital payments, through apps like Apple Pay, Venmo and Zelle. In fact, more than 1 in 10 millennials use their digital wallet for every purchase, according to a separate report by Experian - especially on food, rent and Uber rides.

Overall, about one-third, or 34 percent, of adults under the age of 50 make no purchases in a typical week using cash, compared with 23 percent of those ages 50 and older, Pew found. The Pew Research Center surveyed more than 13,000 adults in September and October of last year.

Wealth also plays a role. Adults with an annual household income of over $75,000 were more than twice as likely as those making less than $30,000 to say they do not make any purchases using cash in a typical week.

On the flip side, lower-income adults were about four times as likely as higher-income adults to say they make all or almost all of their purchases with cash.

But don't count those paper greenbacks out just yet. Cash still remains the most frequent method of payment in the country overall, representing roughly 31 percent of all consumer transactions, more than electronic, credit, debit or checks.

That may prove problematic as more businesses, including Starbucks and Shake Shack, experiment with becoming completely cashless establishments. (Lawmakers working to pass bills that would require retailers to accept cash allege that the growing cashless trend discriminates against low-income customers.)

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More Americans say they don't carry cash

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Cash is no longer king, according to more and more consumers. Fewer and fewer adults are using printed or minted U.S. currency at all any more. About 3 in 10 Americans said they make no purchases with cash in a typical week, up from a quarter in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.

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Fake paper money is illegal and can be made to look like real money, people use it all the time and usually get caught. So if all people used online money it could not have fake versions.

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Paper money uses up valued resources like trees and cotton. They contribute to 12% of global deforestation and 12% of greenhouse gas emissions.

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The dollar has been around since 1862, it is starting to look old fashioned to people and most people want to use new things.

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Paper money is extremely dirty with all types of germs like salmonella, escherichia coli, and S.aureus, which are very dangerous illnesses. And this video shows it.

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Dirty Money: The Cash In Your Pocket Probably Has Poop On It

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One advantage to paper money is that it is better for the banks because they can keep their cash reserves against liabilities. So the currency notes are full legal tender.

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Paper money does not as many uses as online money, like it can help with counting and spending money, or even giving to other people.

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Paper money is always the same thing, but with online money there is a lot like bitcoin and fiat currencies.

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In 2016, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it would stop minting €500 notes, in a move that they say is meant to curb fraud and money laundering. The 500 euro note is the second-largest denomination currently across the common euro currency zone, and the ECB says that it is the banknote of choice among criminals.

While the stated purpose was to stop financial crime, others have speculated that this move was part of a recent "war" on cash, essentially with the government trying to get rid of cash and eliminate money from the economy. In a "race to the bottom" to weaken currencies in order to stimulate flagging economies around the globe, we may ultimately see a complete elimination of paper cash in favor of electronic money - not to be confused with digital currency, such as bitcoin, but rather fiat currencies stored as entries in bank accounts.

The "War" on Cash

At the time of ECB's announcement, the number of 500 euro bills in circulation represented over €300 billion, or nearly one-third of all the euro-denominated cash outstanding. Holding on to physical cash is exactly what negative interest rates, as implemented by the ECB and elsewhere, is meant to dis-incentivize. Because it is relatively easy to hoard cash using €500 notes, eliminating them would benefit the central bank by making it increasingly difficult to avoid the negative interest rate policy (NIRP) mandate. Alternatives to hoarding paper money such as physical assets such as gold are much more cumbersome and costly to store and transfer.

Analysts at Bank of America Corp. ( BAC) have also suggested that eliminating high-denomination banknotes can effectively weaken a currency in global foreign exchange markets. Without a high-value euro bill, people who want to hold cash (rather than spend it) will trade in their euros for higher denominations in other currencies, like the 1,000 note Swiss Francs or U.S. $100 bills. If this analysis is correct, scrapping high-denomination notes would also serve the ECB's motives of indirectly weakening the currency so as to boost exports and spur economic growth.

Paper money also makes it easy for people to withdraw large sums of money from their banks, which can be a cause of bank runs in a fractional reserve banking system, and was a big problem during the 2008 financial crisis. If banks have to pay negative interest rates persistently to central banks, they will ultimately have to pass this cost on to their customers. If a bank charges you a negative 1% interest on your deposits, you are much more likely to withdraw your money in the form of cash. Making it harder to effect those large withdrawals will help stabilize the financial sector in such a case.

The European Central Bank is not alone in this recent "war" on cash to eliminate money from circulation. An ex-banking chief in the U.K. has called for a ban on £50 notes in order to "tackle terrorism," and a former CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Peter Sands has gone on the record calling for the $100 bill to be scrapped in America.

Unfortunately, eliminating cash will likely do little to reduce crime as there are multiple ways to circumvent the need for cash, and even worse, cutting off cash may just lead criminal organizations to innovate and use pre-paid gift cards, digital currency, or bank checks to elude law enforcement.

The Bottom Line

The "war" on cash begun with the European Central Bank's proposal to get rid of the 500 euro note and calls for the elimination of the $100 bill in America. While the argument for the move is that these large bills aid in financial crime and terrorism, the ulterior motive may be to make it harder for banks and consumers to avoid negative interest rates by holding on to actual money.

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In 2016, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it would stop minting €500 notes, in a move that they say is meant to curb fraud and money laundering. The 500 euro note is the second-largest denomination currently across the common euro currency zone, and the ECB says that it is the banknote of choice among criminals.

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This video shows the uses of online money and that some countries are trying to get rid of paper money.

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Fact check_ 'Cashless' society isn't imminent, wouldn't eliminate cash

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Paper money is useless compared to online money. Paper money can not do things like buy things from your home, get things done in an instant, and be protected as well as online money.

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In our steady march toward an all-digital world, an ever-growing array of tangible forms of communication and culture-from printed books and newspapers to handwritten letters (imagine!) to DVDs-are being relegated to history's dustbin. And now we're on the cusp of arguably the biggest transition yet: ditching cold, hard cash for a future in which all money is digital.

Actually, it might seem we're already a good ways along. Just look at our exploding use of credit and debit cards: In 1990 debit cards in the U.S. were used for 300 million purchases; today the total exceeds 40 billion. Swipe technologies like Apple Pay are taking off, as are person-to-person apps such as Venmo and Zelle. Other technologies, involving things like microchip implants, fingerprint scans, and facial recognition, are even eliminating the need for phones and smartwatches. In some places using cash is beginning to feel as outmoded as mailing a check to pay your electric bill.

Printed money didn't come into widespread use until the 17th century, when it was adopted by Europeans, who could exchange their notes for actual gold. In 1933, when the connection between the U.S. dollar and gold was effectively severed, cash truly became just a paper construct. If the paper is no longer needed, logic would suggest, why not just get rid of it?

And yet, as we start to get a sense of what a society without cash might actually look like, that imagined utopia of commerce-where everything is clean, quick, efficient-is running into some resistance. Many of us are stubbornly clinging to our paper money habits. Maybe, just maybe, we'll miss cash more than we realize.

"Money's destiny is to become digital," declared the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development back in 2002. And, indeed, in many developed countries today, cash is clearly in decline. In South Korea just 20 percent of consumer transactions involve cash or checks. In Canada the figure is 29 percent. In Singapore and the Netherlands it's around 40 percent. In the U.S. it's roughly half. A December 2017 report from the Bank of International Settlements found that the number of cashless transactions around the globe has "at least doubled over the last 10 years across all countries."

Nowhere is the cashless movement further along than in Sweden. After a decade during which the country's financial sector made a concerted effort to get people to adopt electronic payment methods-by doing things like keeping no cash on hand at most bank branches and refusing to accept cash deposits-only 15 percent of financial transactions are now done with physical money.

Many stores, along with buses and the Stockholm metro, no longer take cash. Most person-to-person payments are made via a mobile app called Swish, which lets you send money instantaneously from one bank account to another with a phone number. Even street vendors have adopted Swish, and contrary to what you might assume, there isn't a large generational divide; at least half of Swedes over 60 use Swish. It's so popular, in fact, that the verb "to swish" has entered the nation's lexicon.

While the drive to eliminate cash is fueled partly by capitalism's impulse to wring waste out of the system, it is also propelled by consumers' desire to make their lives easier. In Sweden more than 4,000 people have had microchips implanted under their skin, which makes it possible for them to pay with the wave of a hand; it also brings us closer to a Minority Report future in which we're greeted with personalized ads and buying options as we walk down the street.

That may sound extreme, but it's really just a logical extension of the contactless technologies most of us will be using soon, if we aren't already. Apple Pay and Samsung Pay now let you settle up via your smartphone, and last year Samsung rolled out the first trial of its Contactless Companion Platform, which is a chip that can be inserted into an array of objects-watches, key fobs, bracelets-turning them into payment devices.

Amazon is testing a digital payment system that would enable customers to make purchases without ever taking out a wallet or device. An app checks you in as soon as you enter a store, and any items you leave with are recorded by 3-D scanners at the door and automatically billed to your credit card. No clerks, no checkout counters, no lines.

The London supermarket Costcutter, meanwhile, introduced a system in 2017 that allows customers to pay with a fingertip scan. And Mastercard has announced that by April card users will be able to make payments using fingertip and facial recognition technology that employs scanners similar to the ones found on recent iPhones.

Financial institutions have a very big stake in this future, obviously, as individuals must be linked to a bank account or credit card (or, at the very least, possess a prepaid debit card) to go cashless. In an effort to get a leg up, last summer Visa launched Cashless Challenge, which awarded small businesses $10,000 to upgrade their point-of-sale systems to be totally cashless. Companies that applied had to explain what the move would mean for them and their customers.

Whether a cashless consumer experience is your idea of heaven or a dystopian nightmare, a case against paper money is easy to make. For starters, cash is dirty. A 2017 study found that dollar bills from New York banks were covered with hundreds of species of microorganisms, including ones that cause acne. Also, cash can be lost and accidentally destroyed. And, of course, it can be stolen.

Physical currency requires a vast infrastructure to produce, distribute, and protect it. The U.S. spent almost $900 million in 2018 printing new bills. For banks, transporting money from their vaults to ATMs and branches, sending and storing paper checks, and employing tellers to handle deposits and withdrawals is even more expensive. A recent Morgan Stanley study, for instance, found that Bank of America spends $5 billion a year processing checks and cash. There is also the inefficiency of the cash transaction itself. All that careful counting and pawing through the register for change is slow.

One study by research firm IHL Group found that if you factor in the time it takes to make change, count bills and coins at the end of the day, and take the money to the bank, cash transactions cost retailers between 5 and 15 percent of sales. By contrast, digital transactions requiring a simple card swipe or wave of a smart device are typically fast and efficient. And they make it easier, in principle, for people to track their spending, since there's a digital record.

Governments benefit too. For one thing, digital transactions are harder to hide and thus easier to collect taxes on. Plus, eliminating cash can make it more difficult for certain types of illicit businesses to operate. The U.S., for instance, has driven some offshore betting companies out of business by cutting off their ability to process credit card payments. Though criminals can now turn to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, those are also easier to track than cash, since every cryptocurrency transaction is recorded digitally.

Given that going cashless would seem to be a win-win for most of us, how much longer do we have to wait until the revolution is complete? Maybe longer than you'd think. Interestingly, while people are using cash less frequently, the actual amount of cash in circulation has increased. There are more physical dollars (and most other paper currencies) in the world today than ever before. According to the Federal Reserve, 65 percent of Americans regularly carry cash, perhaps because, as one recent consumer survey found, not having money in our wallets makes most of us anxious. Especially for small transactions, cash remains many people's payment method of choice.

Why is that? Partly it's about psychological and cultural factors, including our attachment to what's familiar and not wanting to have our options limited. We might speak of cold, hard cash, but studies have shown that we actually have an emotional attachment to physical money. Participants in a well-known 2011 study cited feeling "a sadness that once you have handed it over, it's gone." Another study found that people who did nothing more than touch money before putting their hands into a pot of hot water were able to endure pain better and longer than people who had handled blank paper instead.

The visceral sense of security we associate with physical money stands in stark contrast to the increased exposure and eroded privacy that would inevitably accompany a cashless economy, in which, theoretically, every transaction is recorded. While that may be good for tracking your own spending habits, it also makes it easy for companies-and potentially governments-to track them too. Historically, consumers have been willing to give up a certain amount of privacy for convenience, but that bargain has soured in recent years as our every move on the internet is tracked, analyzed, and sometimes resold for profit. In that light, cash-and the anonymity it provides-can be appealing.

There are also technological impediments to the cashless takeover. Particularly in the U.S., businesses have been slow to adopt cashless systems (which is why companies like Visa are paying them to do it). Some are understandably anxious about vulnerability to hacking and cyberattacks, power grid failures, and outages in banking networks-like the one that hit Visa's payment systems in Europe last June.

The company's network suffered widespread disruptions for close to 10 hours, which rendered vast numbers of businesses unable to process transactions and provoked a run on ATMs, sending shockwaves through the continent's economy. Another reminder of the limitations of going cashless was Puerto Rico's experience after Hurricane Maria knocked out more than 80 percent of the island's power lines for months, which prevented many residents from accessing their money and made electronic transactions impossible.

The fact is a lot of economic activity around the globe is still conducted using cash, and not only in less developed regions. Wealthy Americans may not use cash to buy much (according to a McKinsey study, once you get into the upper middle class, cash accounts for just 2 percent of all point-of-sale transactions), but many of the workers the wealthy employ-nannies, gardeners, housekeepers-are paid in cash. Such off-the-books transactions would be impossible in a fully cashless economy. Ditto tips for hotel housekeepers, doormen, valets, baristas, and the like. Workers in the tourism industry, for instance, would likely see their incomes decline in a cashless world. And those who don't have checking or savings accounts-close to 7 percent of Americans (mostly non-white)-would be at risk of being shut out of the system completely.

Another aspect of going cashless is the impact it would have on our spending habits. Precisely because cash gives us a feeling of security, handing it over is painful in a way that swiping a card or waving a phone is not. What economists call "the price of paying" is simply higher with cash. As one consumer put it, "I really see the cash going out of my pocket when I spend."

Thus, when we use cash we tend to value those purchases more. In one experiment, subjects had to buy a mug. Some used cash, others a debit card. Then the researchers offered to buy the mugs back. The people who had paid cash demanded, on average, almost twice as much for their mugs-suggesting that they valued them more highly. The essential idea here is that when we use cash, we are connected to-and are arguably more in control of-our spending.

When we use cards or other electronic forms of payment, we suffer from what is sometimes called the decoupling effect: We're less connected to the money we're spending, which makes it easier to spend freely. Studies have found that the presence of the American Express logo on a shopping catalog makes people buy more. One famous experiment conducted by the economist Drazen Prelec involved a silent auction for tickets to sold-out NBA games. Half the bidders were told they could pay only with cash (or a check), and half could pay only with a credit card.

On average the credit card buyers bid more than twice as much as the cash buyers. Not surprisingly, there appears to be a correlation between a country's electronic transactions and its level of household debt, with Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, and, yes, Sweden ranking high in both categories.

The willingness to be more profligate when using digital money isn't only about buying on credit. People shopping with gift cards also spend more than their cash-paying counterparts. (Even more weirdly, people using a photocopier card make more copies than people who pay for their copies with cash.) When McDonald's began experimenting with touchscreen order kiosks, it saw a pickup in sales in stores that had them; in one outlet the average touchscreen order was 30 percent higher than those placed at the counter.

Although it's impossible to say when total cashlessness will come to pass, we can surmise that when it does we'll spend more freely and take on more debt. Our kids will grow up without ceramic piggy banks, gifts from the Tooth Fairy, and birthday cards from Grandma with a few bills slipped in. But they will adapt. A cashless society will not be a utopia-it will involve complicated trade-offs.

Privacy and control will be sacrificed for convenience and ease. We will have a more efficient economy, but in some ways a more regulated one, with fewer ways to bend the rules. And we'll undoubtedly have a more distant, impersonal relationship to money. Our feeling that cash is more intimate, more real, than electronic money is an illusion. It's just a very hard one to shake.
This story appears in the February 2019 issue of Town & Country.
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Have We Reached the End of the Age of Cash?

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In our steady march toward an all-digital world, an ever-growing array of tangible forms of communication and culture-from printed books and newspapers to handwritten letters (imagine!) to DVDs-are being relegated to history's dustbin. And now we're on the cusp of arguably the biggest transition yet: ditching cold, hard cash for a future in which all money is digital.