Reading: Half-Sentence Matching - 2020 őszi

Here is a dead-end job: Swedish bank robber. Two years ago there were only two bank robberies in all of Sweden, compared with 110 eight years earlier. Why the steep plunge? It is because the country is going cashless. In 1661 Sweden became the first European country to print banknotes; several centuries later, it might become the first country to get rid of them. Card readers and mobile-payment apps are now used even in situations that were once reserved for dog-eared paper money and pocket change, like donating in church. Buses in Sweden don't accept cash. Neither do street traders. Though the government is still printing Sweden's national currency, the kroner, two-thirds of Swedes say they feel that they could live without banknotes and coins. The kroner accounted for barely 2 percent of the value of all payments made last year and fewer than half of Swedish banks keep any cash on hand. Which might be why Swedish thieves are undertaking more and more bizarre crimes, including a recent series of breaking into moving delivery trucks from a car travelling 50 miles an hour, its lights off to avoid detection. After several such attacks, the Swedish postal service, PostNord, managed to catch the highway robbers by wiring a truck with cameras, filling it with Apple products and waiting. On a road somewhere in southwest Sweden the robbers took the bait and cops moved in. "Thieves are more interested in high-value items now than cash," says PostNord's head of security. Criminals have also shown new enthusiasm for the trade in endangered species. Crimes involving protected species recently reached their highest level in a decade. A single great gray owl - known as the "phantom of the North" - now goes for 1 million kroner (about $120,000) on the dark web. Though it is no small irony that going cashless might inspire more crime rather than less, it is, from one perspective, predictable. Research indicates that as we gain "psychological distance" from money, our willingness to steal increases. Which helps explain why so many people cheat on taxes, inflate insurance claims and steal Post-it Notes from the office. Or steal electronic goods from moving delivery trucks.