ATM For Anonymous Online Payments

prichardson writes "The New York Times has an article about a way to anonymously transfer cash online (NYT registration required)." The inventor, Carl Amos, believes the target market for his newly-patented 'Aunty IM' ATM machine "..might be teenagers.. [who] do not usually have their own credit cards, they usually have cash and are more than willing to spend it to download music or games", as well as "those who were worried about identity theft on the Internet, or who simply wanted the privacy it provided."

Comments

google linkage

[Neophytus]

heh. No reg required ;)

This is old hat in Japan

[TokyoJimu]

Sorry to disappoint Mr. Amos, but for at least the past twenty years, you have been able to make anonymous cash payments at any bank ATM in Japan.

You just key in the bank name and account number to transfer to, insert the cash, and it's on its way. The ATM will even make change for you.

Re:This looks like a good way to fund terrorists

[PincheGab]

The law is that if you transfer $10,000 or more to a financial institution it needs to be reported to the feds

It's not even that simple, nor is the threshold that high. There are several levels of reporting requirements and the lowest explicit thresholds are at about $3000 for most states.

Additionally, funds transfers companies are burdened with detecting "suspicious" transactions, and you have to report those no matter what the amounts are.

I am not going to spell out how to do this, just suffice it to say that the methods are very sophisticated.

This guy ain't implementing his invention in the USA (and the non-triangle of terror countries) until he gets some heavy-duty legal compliance checking stuff into his system. The age of anonymous funds transfers is over.

Easily Bypassing NYT 'Registration Required'

[FsG]

1. Click on URL, you're redirected to registration/login page
2. Go to URL bar, replace "www" with "archive" in the URL, leaving the rest alone, and hit ENTER
3. The system will bounce you around a few erroneous URLs, before returning you to the homepage
4. All NYT links will now work without registration, thanks to a special cookie set by the bouncing process

Re:How can I pay you?

[Jac_no_k]

Doesn't American Express have something like this? It's called Private Payments. It gives you a unique number that's lets you obscure your identity.

Now there's probably a market for teenagers and such. But I'm thinking pre-paid cards will take care of that...

illegal

[austad]

Unfortunately, this is illegal. I work for one of the companies listed in the article.

It's against the law. The feds say that all ATM transactions must have positive ID of the cardholder (PIN number, driver's license swipe, etc) As far as electronic money transfers go, there has to be some positive identification on the person sending the money, but curiously from what I can find, not on the person receiving it.

Nice idea, just not legal here in the US.