Here are some interesting statistics about the US payment system (as extracted from the 2013 Federal Reserve Payments Study)

• The estimated annual number of unauthorized transactions (third-party fraud) in 2012 was 32.3 million, with a value of $6.4 billion.
• Among general-purpose card payments in 2012, card-not-present fraud rates were estimated to be approximately 3 times card-present fraud rates. Card-not-present fraud rates by value were not, however, dramatically different from card-present fraud rates.
• The estimated number of noncash payments, excluding wire transfers, was 122.4 billion in 2012, with a value of $174.4 trillion.
• The number of debit card payments exceeded the number of credit card payments for the first time around 2004. In 2012, the number of debit card payments had reached 47.0 billion—much higher than the 26.2 billion credit card payments in the same year.
• The number of checks paid continued to decline, falling to 18.3 billion in 2012