From the Future of Money Design Award comes a contest to design a future financial crime. Hmm, with digital money becoming increasingly common and financial instruments ever more deliberately opaque, seems to me a future financial crime could blend those two trends together with money laundering.
Whether we like it or not, crime is a driving force behind a large proportion of technological ‘progress’; this is especially true regarding money. In 1817, a burglary at a British dockyard led the government to start a competition challenging locksmiths to invent an unpickable lock. The result was the Chubb detector lock, and it remained ‘unpicked’ for 33 years.
In the past, adding another lock or increasing the wall thickness of a safe was the obvious solution to deter theft. However, as our money becomes completely electronic, new crimes will undoubtedly be committed which take advantage of the technology itself. Perhaps if we could imagine what crimes might happen, we could start to think about how to prevent them.
What financial crimes could be committed within a completely electronic marketplace?We invite creative practitioners to imagine and design a future monetary based crime. A crime which utilises a loophole, a social convention or specific technology.