Ukash

» see ukash.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ukash existed because a very large number of people in Europe wanted to buy things online and had no card to do it with. That is the whole product. You walked into a newsagent or a corner shop, handed over cash, and walked out holding a printed code. The code was money, and the merchant at the other end accepted it the way they would accept a card number.

Smart Voucher Ltd started it in London in 2005. Distribution spread to retail counters and ATMs across dozens of countries, a Russian deal landed in 2010, and in June 2014 the company added a reloadable prepaid MasterCard in euros and dollars, which was the point at which it started trying to become an ordinary payments business.

I never touched one. Paying without a card in Turkey ran through mobile kontör and through bank-issued prepaid cards, so the voucher-code habit that was completely unremarkable in Britain and Germany was not a shape I ever ran into. What did reach here was the other half of the Ukash story, and it arrived on Turkish computers in exactly the form it arrived everywhere else.

~ the record ~

~ the nineteen digits ~

A Ukash voucher was a 19-digit number. You typed it in at checkout and it was spent. If the purchase came to less than the voucher's face value, a merchant licensed to issue Ukash could hand you a fresh code for the remainder, which is change, working the way change works at a till.

The decision underneath all of it was to make the thing a bearer instrument. Whoever held the number held the money. No account, and no way to reverse a payment once the code had been read. That is what made it work for a fifteen-year-old with pocket money and for an adult with no bank, and it is also the flaw.

~ the other use ~

Ransomware wanted Ukash. The lock-screen malware of the early 2010s, the family that put a fake police notice on your desktop and demanded a fine, asked for payment in Ukash or in one of its competitors, because a code emailed to a stranger is untraceable in a way a bank transfer never is. Ars Technica documented an Android variant in 2014 demanding $300. The Guardian covered a Spanish police operation against a ransomware gang in February 2013 running the same playbook.

Ordinary fraud used it too. Fake loan fees, and goods listed on Gumtree that did not exist. Cold callers talked pensioners through reading a code down the phone. Ukash published consumer guidance in 2012 telling people to guard the codes like cash and never to give one out by phone or email, and in 2013 it backed the launch of a site called AvoidOnlineScams.net. Both are the actions of a company that understood its product had a second market it could not close off.

~ the merge ~

Skrill Group had bought the Austrian voucher company paysafecard in 2013. It came for Ukash next, and Finextra carried the completion announcement on 1 April 2015. Wikipedia's lead puts the acquisition a full year earlier than its own history section does, which is the sort of discrepancy that survives in an article about a company nobody is checking any more.

The wind-down itself was orderly. Distribution stopped on 31 August 2015, existing vouchers stayed spendable until 31 October 2015, and after that date holders had to swap them for paysafecard PINs. Paysafecard announced in May 2016 that the migration was complete. Very few payment schemes get to end by handing their customers over intact.

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