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This smart wallet has a built-in camera for catching thieves

This smart wallet has a built-in camera for catching thieves

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Volterman

Wallets already seem anachronistic. They're stuffed with paper currency, analog identification cards, and credit cards that are easily emulated by your phone. But what if your wallet had 512MB of RAM, a built-in camera, and doubled as a Wi-Fi hot spot?

Volterman is a new smart wallet project on Indiegogo. It includes all the guts of a years-old smartphone, other than a screen. You can use it to charge your phone, you can pair it over Bluetooth to act as an alarm if you forget your phone, or have your phone act as an alarm if you forget your wallet. There's also GPS, 3G connectivity (for that Wi-Fi hot spot), and RFID protection. The wallet can apparently even do wireless charging of your phone, and can itself be charged wirelessly by an optional leather charging pad. (There are also cables available if your phone doesn't support wireless charging.)

The creepiest feature, though, is the built-in camera. When the wallet is in "lost" mode, it will take a picture of anybody who is peeking into it. Perhaps in recognition of how strange some people might feel about having a camera in their wallet, the feature is listed as optional.

The wallet comes in three cardholder, bifold, and travel sizes, with batteries ranging from 2,000mAh to 5,000mAh.

While it's not impossible to imagine all of these features inside a wallet, the advertised December ship date on this Indiegogo sounds highly improbable. The spec list includes Bluetooth 5.0, which is only shipping in one major product right now (the Galaxy S8), so five months seems like an aggressive timeline to get a new Bluetooth chipset through the FCC and then manufactured and shipped to backers.

If you're willing to risk it, though, the early-bird price on the cardholder model is $98.