After temporarily disabling the provisioning of prepaid cards, the Google Wallet team has reinstated the use prepaid cards after issuing a few security fixes. In an update to the blog post that originally announced Google’s decision to flip the off switch on prepaid cards, Vice President of Google Wallet and Payments, Osama Bedier, explained:
Yesterday afternoon, we restored the ability to issue new prepaid cards to the Wallet. In addition, we issued a fix that prevents an existing prepaid card from being re-provisioned to another user. While we’re not aware of any abuse of prepaid cards or the Wallet PIN resulting from these recent reports, we took this step as a precaution to ensure the security of our Wallet customers. If you are unable to access your previous prepaid card balance for any reason, please contact our toll-free support for assistance.
Google Wallet has certainly had it’s share of hurdles to clear recently, what with a gang of researchers successfully hacking the app and then the security issues that were addressed last week. As they mentioned in the original post, mobile payments will likely be the way of the future so this could be a valuable service once the wrinkles are all ironed out. Well, it’ll be useful until we all get those frontal lobe implants that laser credit card numbers at cash registers and check-out screens in order to process our transactions.