There’s a lot of buzz around about the adoption of contactless payments using mobile phones. It’s a more convenient payment method, it’s faster and it means we don’t have to walk around with all that small change in our pockets.

According to a recent study by Juniper Research, about 52 million consumers will be using the technology by 2011 to pay for everything from train tickets to candy.

Not everyone is thrilled about the contactless payment trend though.  Greg Day, at McAfee is sounding alarm bells at what he sees as the increasing temptation the technology will afford crooks.

“It makes me quite nervous. It’s to this type of contactless small payments arena that smart data criminals will turn: if they just take a fiver from everyone, rather than larger sums from fewer people, they’ll still make a fortune.” says Day.

The majority of mobile phone users (86% according to research conducted by DataMonitor and McAfee), are concerned about potential security breaches such as identity theft or fraud.

Yet, despite this, 79% of mobile phone owners polled knowingly used their mobile phones without activating any of the available security features. Another 15% didn’t know what security measures were activated on their phones.

We suggest that companies in the contactless payments arena devote some of their marketing budgets to educating consumers about mobile phone security. Ditto for the mobile phone manufacturers.    

We also suggest that consumers check out our OneTouch Online Purchasing service which allows them to pay for, and download digital content to their mobiles without revealing any personal or financial information whatsoever. Your identity can’t be stolen if no one knows who you are.