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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

From their payments page [1]:

    The following credit cards are accepted through this  
    payment facility: Visa, Master, Diners and Amex.

I don't know if any of those companies offers prepaid credit cards.

[1] http://www.hetzner.co.za/helpcentre/index.php/articles/conte...

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There are prepaid cards in almost every US grocery and convenience store, typically Mastercard and Visa. They don't require any ID to buy and have a fee around $5. Most can't be reloaded.

Most of those cards say that payment can only happen in the United States. I wonder if that applies to online services?

You can exchange bitcoins on IRC for prepaid virtual visas and mastercards, paypal, any 3rd party payment you want. There's a few web services for exchanging coins to visa too, which I can't remember right now but are posted to bitcointalk forums.

Of course if you were setting up an illegal hidden service payment would be the least of your worries. Moving it around every few weeks inside Russia like the inter-dimensional dark fortress in Krull to prevent long term traffic analysis, maintaining your site from a moving location everyday, and making sure you don't blow opsec giving away your identity is probably more difficult than finding creative methods to pay for hosting.

They all do (maybe not Diners, I didn't realize they were still a thing). I use them from time to time to get around the geofencing of purchases, or when I really don't trust the site.

I know Visa and Amex do. Recent darkweb busts have displayed a level of arrogance that is somewhat disturbing.

This page states they also support Direct Deposit, which means you can walk into any bank and deposit cash, no ID required.

Seems like that should also open one up to an identifying attack of sorts. Find out when deposits were made (assuming there is more than one), grab all the security video from those times, and try to identify the person who is in all of those clips. Facial recognition software should get one the rest of the way. I imagine you would only need 3 or 4 deposit events to reliably identify someone?

No, Direct Deposit in Germany usually refers to Giro[1] which is a payment between bank accounts. (Credit cards and even debit Visa/MasterCards are relatively uncommon in Germany)

I've never seen an actual cash deposit payment while I lived there, though we do have them in Sweden for example.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro

In the US there's no option for this... Most banks will not allow you to deposit funds into another persons account.

This is false; I've done it several times with no issue.

Yeah, because banks have no cameras, you can go in wearing a mask and everything, just to remain anonymous while paying your hidden service server.

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