This is an interesting development in the world of online payment methods. PayByCash is now offering PayByCash Codes to facilitate payments from online vendors such as MMOs and auction sites.

The benefit for the consumer is that they have another alternative to credit cards for making payments to gaming sites. The benefit for the vendor is (I assume) that they pass on the charge-back risk to PayByCash. According to an article in The Financial Express from India, it also allows vendors to access markets where teens and college aged students are less likely to have access to a credit card or where they may be “unbanked” as described by the article.

Attaching monetary value to a code is nothing new, but because of the flexibility of a payment platform like PayByCash this is much more like a direct code-to-cash-relationship as opposed to a code-to-unlock-features relationship.

One interesting feature is the PayByCash address option that allows the user to retain some anonymity by using an address supplied by PayByCash rather than their own address. This may be a source of frustration for some regulatory and law enforcement bodies.

I wonder if a secondary market will develop for these codes? The expiry date and the one time use might stimey the development of a secondary market a little bit but I’m guessing we’ll see them start popping up on auction sites. My wish for PayByCash is that we do not see the codes on the carder forums.