Comment by alexgieg

There's a huge error in the article. It says Pix doesn't lead to kidnapping and torture. It absolutely does.

Kidnapping people then forcing them to unlock their phones to make a Pix to the kidnapper is such a huge problem here in Brazil that banks have instituted layers upon layers of safety measures, such as reduced nightly transfer limits, different limits on whether you're sending money to someone you know vs someone you never sent money before vs businesses etc. So if a criminal sees you have a lot of money they keep you kidnapped for days until you transfer everything a piece a day. And their colleagues then withdraw the values or transfer them through several accounts, making it impossible to recover.

Part of that also involves forcing the kidnapped person to make all the loans their banks provide them, conveniently easy to do in the same app you use to make a Pix, and then send them the money.

Due to that we also have insurance specifically covering forced Pix transfers, but with limits above which the bank isn't responsible.

Some people defend themselves via alternative means. I myself, for example, keep a cheap phone exclusively for bank transactions at home, never installing the app on my main phone I carry with me. Which I also keep rooted, as that prevents baking apps from being installed (they refuse to run).

Oh! And there's fraud to in the form of replacing the fraudster's QR code for a business's, without the business noticing, so payments go to the wrong account.

And recently the government has started threatening big businesses that fail obeying arbitrary pressure due to this or the political reason with suspension from the Pix system, which due to how much it's used would severely cripple them as they'd lost tons of customers who have neither debit nor credits cards, so those businesses end up obeying. So there's that too.

TL;DR: Pix doesn't really solve those safety aspects the author talks about. But other than that, yes, it's extremely convenient and functional.