Chinese Mobile Payments Boom Leads Straight to Prison

It’s not so much that Chinese mobile payments users are going to prison so much as Chinese prisoners are increasingly mobile payments users. It’s a fine distinction, but one that needs to be made. At any rate, new technology is prompting change all over, and reports note that Alipay has actually branched out into prisons with its “prison pay” service.

Alipay prison pay, reports note, is being implemented in Chinese prisons by the Prison Administration Bureau in Beijing. With it, prisoners will be able to buy daily items using money sent their way by family members still on the outside. Right now, the service is only available in Beijing, but given the state of the mobile payments market in China, that will likely change in the weeks to come.

Prisoners can receive up to 1,000 yuan—$147.98 US as of this writing—a month, and prisoners cannot have more than 5,000 yuan—$739.92, also as of this writing—in their accounts at any one time.

For those wondering what in the world prisoners can buy in prison, the idea isn’t so outlandish. The United States actually has a similar system, a “commissary” style system, that allows for such purchases, and several different methods of supplying inmates with cash to make those purchases. One such system, JPay, had actually been hacked just last year, which led to inmates artificially inflating their accounts into the six-figure range.

While it’s not hard to see why Alipay went after this market—another untapped market for it to pick up and thus land some extra market share processing payments therein—it’s somewhat questionable for this market to even exist. There’s a lot that’s wrong with the prison system in general, and introducing elements of an economy probably won’t help. Still, from a strictly corporate standpoint, someone was likely to produce this market and if Alipay didn’t take it on, WeChat Pay probably would have. Though given WeChat Pay’s perception in the market—remember, it’s WeChat Pay for pennies, and Alipay for big bucks—you’d think that the deflated prison economy would have been better suited to WeChat Pay.

Still, it’s one more advance for Alipay, and one more way that mobile payments demonstrates its incredible utility in literally every part of society.