Web giant Google’s virtual wallet mobile app, Google Wallet, may discontinue prepaid cards next month after having overcome a series of insecurity issues.
Google said users would no longer have the ability to add funds to the cards as from September 17 and that the prepaid cards will be withdrawn from Google Wallet app on October 17.
Google is currently urging the users of its prepaid cards to spend the balances on their cards ahead of the deadline. Users would not be able to spend their balances afterwards.
Google however promised the users they would able to request a refund of any remaining funds after that date.
The cards, Google says, became obsolete following the introduction of the ability to use credit and debit cards with Google Wallet.
On August 1, Google had announced that its payment system was onward bound to the cloud making it possible to accept all major credit and debit cards.
Google Wallet, introduced in 2011, was hailed as an innovative and a simple way to make purchases using near-field communication (NFC) technology and a smartphone.
Mass adoption of the mobile commerce platform however faced major barrier as it had just a few methods of payments such as Google prepaid card that could be reloaded by credit cards.
The prepaid card in addition suffered weaknesses, which could allow money to be stolen from a user’s account.
Google later shelved the use of the cards following a series of hacks that allowed access to users’ acconts by resetting the PIN using a prepaid card.
Google later issued a fix, which prevented the cards from being passed over to another person and instead, restored the ability to issue prepaid cards.
