A way to make anonymous online donations
jpkoning.blogspot.com
jpkoning.blogspot.com
Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud. Also, the given address could be automatically checked against the geolocation of his IP address to make sure he's being honest. And it's not difficult to filter Tor/VPN IPs.
Another problem is that while he never gave personal information, he still created a pseudo-anonymous identity that can be profiled and potentially linked to his real identity based on a myriad of potential factors. Whereas if he used something like Monero (which he seems to be aware of), then there would be no such risk. There's really no point to this method anymore, and another commentator pointed out it wouldn't even work in certain countries.
How? I get how it might be the case if you're doing it to evade donation restrictions, but merely lying about your identity isn't fraud anymore than giving a fake phone number/zip code to the cashier when asked. AFAIK if you're not benefiting financially from the deception, it's not fraud.
This makes me wonder if giving a fake phone number to a cashier to obtain a financial discount (like a supermarket club card) is fraud...
I can't say it isn't, but I also can't think of a specific reason that it is.
Payment processing uses address information for two main purposes: (1) determining sales tax jurisdiction/amount and (2) as an authentication factor (along with card number, CVV, and name).
In any normal purchase, giving a fake address could cause you to pay the wrong amount of taxes and/or taxes to the wrong people, which would be a legal issue. But this is a charitable donation, so that doesn't apply here.
The authentication thing is probably OK, too, since you are an authorized user of the card. You are giving wrong information, but not in order to gain access to something you're not supposed to have access to.
Maybe there's some other reason, though. Also, giving a fake address might violate some kind of agreement with the card company, although I kind of doubt they care if it doesn't cause them a practical problem.
This really hits home how different the US culture is from mine (Greek). Here's a crime that really shouldn't be a crime (being able to anonymously spend money), that has an extremely low rate of getting caught (who's going to find who you are if you use Tor or just go to Starbucks?) and is extremely unlikely to prosecute ("your honor, he used the wrong zip code on the card website!"), but people mention "this is a crime" as a deterrent. Over here people would think you were joking.
This cuts both ways, of course, and people commit more serious crimes (fraud, corruption, etc) more easily. It reinforces to me the adage that the best things about a country are also the worst things about that country.
Many, many people seem to be missing the mental concept of "a crime that shouldn't be a crime". You know it's wrong because it's against the law, and of course it's against the law because it's wrong.
Prepaid SIM cards need to be registered and tied to your SSN here, so a prepaid SIM would not work to get around this problem.
You might think I live in some authoritarian state or something but I actually live in Norway. In general life is good but I find these things disconcerting :(
I guess it might be doable to use one of those online services that will send and receive SMS on your behalf without registering any personal information. But I didn’t try that and for all I know it could be that SMS from such numbers would be rejected or flagged by the bank.
"Sorry to disturb you, but could you please help? I just lost my phone. I urgently need to be reachable for {"my ill grandmother", "my biggest client"}. I have money on me, and I already bought a new phone, but I left my id at the hotel in $next_city, and the shop won't sell me a sim card without it. I'm desperate! Could you please help me out and get me a 20€ prepaid card?"
Give it 10 minutes tops and you'll have your sim...
Yes there is a slight risk that someone in the delivery chain will open the envelope and steal the money, but I suspect the chances of this happening (at least here in Canada) are slim, especially if the envelope is inconspicuous.
Cash is still the ultimate way to make anonymous transactions.
As a pure thought experiment, let's just admit that the rich own our political process, and make it explicit:
- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.
- All contributions have to go through the Treasury, and are public.
- If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.
Again, this is not a complete thought, but the intent is to drive politics away from the current poker match, toward chess.
I heard of a variation of this where the multiplier is ln(x) or sqrt(x), so there's diminishing returns from additional donations. That way the rich don't have as much outsized impact on politics.
Not sure how this would be much of a penalty; how many rich folks who donate to politicians are themselves wanting to run for office?
Disenfranchisement for N years (where N could be "for life") would seem to make more sense. But it would probably have a side effect of pushing that person to find backchannels of influence.
Then again, this is just analogous to tyranny of the majority in conventional democracy. Elected governments can (and do) fortify their majority through voter disenfranchisement, or even genocide.
Taken to the limit, we could even get an immediate summary of what percentage of our retail purchases go to which political issues and buy according to our ethical values. It would be a way to put democracy back in the hands of the middle class since our combined buying power is larger than the wealthy class (I assume, I actually don't know if this is true anymore).
Beyond that, there can also be additional tax advantages to giving to giving via DAF, especially if you have appreciated stock, bitcoin, etc. [3]
1. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
This sentence really stood out to me as an example of why politics has become so polarized.
If you have political ideals {A, B, C} and there are others who have ideals {A, B, !C}, and you allow your shared beliefs of {A, B} to either sway your opinion on C, or be not willing to communicate openly about it, then you are exacerbating the problem.
This forces people to try to try to identify with the group that they have the largest intersection with, and usually assume the ideals that that group has. Which means that a majority may silently be in support of C, but are so set in an us-vs-them mindset, that they allow !C to become part of their ideology.
This seems a natural byproduct of the type of voting system used. If every individual could vote secretly on every proposed bill, rather than having to vote for someone to publicly do our voting for us, we'd no longer need to have an us versus them system in politics.
Do schools even have debate anymore?
Though, I'm thinking of the US, so this may be different in Canada or elsewhere.
See, e.g., https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a...
> The funding parameter of the card object exposes whether the card is a credit, debit, or prepaid card. A card may be unknown if Stripe was unable to determine its funding type.
If SaaS startups can block prepaid cards from being used for trials, there's no reason why this shouldn't be required for political campaigns.