Facebook - Financial Trap of a Lifetime

While I enjoy Facebook, I don't spend that much time on it.  Usually I'll scroll down through it in the morning to see if there's anything interesting and then later in the evening before I go to bed.  Even when I was totally incapacitated, Facebook was not a place I visited very often.  This is because most of what my friends post is not that interesting (sorry friends).  Yesterday was a bit unusual in that I saw one of my friends, a woman I graduated from high school with, was all hippy dippy happy because you can now use Facebook to transfer funds.  A bit of discourse ensued.  You need to use your own, personal debit card to process these transfers and I told her current security protocols dictate never using your debit card for Internet transactions.  Her response was "but it's Facebook!  It can't get any safer!"  Duhhh

The bait

There was some discussion back in March when the information was released, but there are still a lot of questions.  It's free for Facebook users, but is your bank going to charge you a transfer fee?  Or, if the receiving card is with a different bank, will they get a charge?  Right now it's only for debit cards but eventually they're planning on opening it up to credit cards.  If you use a credit card, will it count as a cash withdrawal?  One of the bits in the "fine print" that most people don't see is that it may take up to 3 days for the transfer to actually take place.  So what do you do if it's an emergency and someone desperately needs funds?  Use Western Union?

Of course none of these thoughts passed through her head because she was so caught up in her "how cool is that" moment.  Anyway, she wasn't too happy with me because I urged the use of caution and restraint rather than jumping on board the Bandwagon and starting to wave the Facebook flag.  For people who can't manage their finances this could be the trap of their lifetime.