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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."
heh. No reg required ;)
Now we can secretly fund the legal defense of mp3ers and linux users ...
Power to the people! Vivé la transaction!
This would be perfect for when you want to buy something without being tracked... but there is still a trail. You could use one of these machines, but if the feds got involved, they could probaqbly find you (from the camera, etc). It would leave some sort of a trail. Still, not bad for buying that fake vagina you always wanted.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
So how would I go about paying someone online? Today I could use
a credit card or Paypal at someone's web site...how could this be
done from an ATM? (No, I'm not gonna try to punch in the recipient's
URL!)
That's a rather critical detail not mentioned in the article.
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'nuff said
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PayPal wont accept payment for "adult" related eBusiness now (ie; pornos).
Whoever steps in to fill that gap make a friggin mint. The frontrunner seems to be CitiBank's C2It, though I know nothing of such services.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This will allow me to assist my Nigerian friend, Joseph Mbuto, in his attempt to free the $21 million dollar account his uncle once controlled.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
If you pay cash for your (legitimate?) music/movie/pr0n download, does the machine have a CD/DVD burner and a disc pops out, or does it have to re-direct the download stream to an e-mail account (thereby identifying the user, damn!).
Some more details on capability would be cool. Google here I come.
I can see the US government blowing a gasket
about quick and easy anonymous money transfer...
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
From the article: "N the 1997" N?! Now even the New York Times is slipping into Net-speak. *sigh* My old high school English teachers must be in agony. So much for the American education system....
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
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.
The New York Times has an article about a way to anonymously transfer cash online (NYT registration required)
...
Why to I find this sentence funny ?
So, finally banking can be anonymous (yeah right, in your wildest dreams, but we still need to register with NYT?
No wait, you can't do do banking with a hotmail account
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How does it perform identification to verify that the person picking up the money is the person you paid. I don't really see this serving any use since there already is a cash transfer system. It's called postal money orders.
Good ol' R, S , and A made quite a while back a system to digitize money into extremly long numbers to represent money. Each number would be encoded the bill amount alone. They also proved it would be untrackable and unbreakable.
They also made into the system a way of determining real-time if any "bill" was being used more than once.
Wow. Anonymous atm. It's a real shocker if it hasnt already be theorized up to the top.
boring.
This sounds like a very good idea to me. Being one of those teens that has money, Its a pain to buy stuff online through my parents. Although I could also see this being used for bad, i.e. kids anonymously buying pr0n, alchohol, or other illegal/immoral things.
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
The law is that if you transfer $10,000 or more to a financial institution it needs to be reported to the feds. Criminals will need to do a lot of micro transactions to pay their bills.
This is not hearsay or speculation, I work in the financial services industry, and I can tell you that the financial laws are going the other way - less anonymity and higher identification requirements for money wires.
In other words, this guy will have to keep transactions down a ridiculously low upper limit to avoid ID requirements.
I have seen people wiring money for very fraudulent puposes, so I don't really share people's feelings that wiring money should be anonymous.
As for this guy's plans to use the technolgy abroad, he should take into consideration that the USA is requiring other countries to follow USA-like laws and he might have the same issue abroad.
Again, this is from first-hand experience, not hearsay.
I run a couple websites and a large portion of my user base is kids in the range of 14-17. Collecting cash from them has always been a problem. Some would opt to send in cash, but this has problems as well. I can see this becoming very popular if it gets implemented well.
Obviously this system is not perfect, but as a teenager who has a good deal of cash but no credit card, and doesn't like to go to his parents to buy stuff online, I think I would definitely use this if I thought it was safe. I am security-minded, but the main reason I would use this is convenience, not privacy. However, rather than buying music and games online, like the article suggested, I would probably use it to buy real merchandise (band shirts, etc)
A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
Although I really support the idea of being anonymous for protective purposes, I don't quite understand how this product helps very much.
Sure, you don't have the logs of cash coming out of your account (credit, savings, etc), but there is cash being sent somewhere, and that somewhere has to be well-defined for the cash to get there.
Also, the product, assuming something is bought, has to go somewhere, again a well-defined location, even if it is a mail-drop.
AFAIK, all wired money transactions are logged in some fashion, and for this to be approved by the government, it would have to be as well. I still don't see how super-beneficial this gimmick might be.
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.
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
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With all of the anti-terrorism tasks in effect there is no way this will happen and/or last simply because it's an anonymous way to move funds. This goes directly against laws being implemented to stop all forms of money laundering, transfering funds with maximum anonimity, and fake store fronts of which to move the money through.
There's so much more to this but the only way this idea would make it is for it to not be anon but that defeats the purpose right?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Why not just use the $1000 to buy the gun? What's the point of buying the card?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Everything in society is not about terrorism, yet it is the overwhelming topic. I want to make and addendum to Godwin's Law:
Every slashdot discussion will eventually mention terrorism.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
The conversation really goes like:
I'd like a gun and ammo
Here you go. That'll be $342.22
Here's my anonymous cash card!
Right, here's your pistol and ammo.
Oh - I won't be needing a bag...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Getting a debit card and a checking account is trivial and legal for any 6yr old. That's NOT the target market.
...
But it's primary use will be for drug dealers to launder money. For married men(and women) to pay for hookers and strippers. For people to turn petty cash into petty lap dance...
Big market for those things tho
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
You forgot this demographic:
10% people who have had their credit trashed via identity theft and can no longer get even a debit card.... you know the same people who, as soon as they open weven savings bank account, get hit with legal garnishments by the government and collection agencies. Believe it or not, some people are *forced* to operate on a cash only basis and I'm not just talking about paycheck to paycheck, lower 10% of the economey types.
Oh and this demo. as well:
10% illegal aliens. You know... people without SSNs. Oh sure, you say "good thing"; they shouldn't be allowed to use the InterWeb in the USA if their "illegal", but when their cheap labor goes away, you bemoan the fact that all the jobs are going across the boarder/overseas.
Basically, for every illegitimate excuse you can think of, I can think of 10 legitimate uses.
The slashdot blurb talks about anonymous payments... Lots of comments in this thread talk about anonymous payments whether how it would work or whether the gov't would cry foul, etc...
A search on the article itself does NOT have the word "anonymous" anywhere in it.
So... given that the article is very short on implementation details, how does one come to the conclusion there is anything anonymous about it? Because no credit card is involved? Not saying it isn't... but it just seems there's a big jump to conclusions.. unless I'm blind.
is OK, but the real winner for the adult industry has got to be HSBC's rival Cl1t system. So much more to the point...
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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.
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The potential profits are too low for the risks involved. Also, there are already ATMs that have been retrofitted to accept cash for the purpose of paying bills for defined (telco, utility) customers. Ever see one?
There are cheaper and more cost-effective ways to do this than via ATM, I filed a provisional patent app for one years ago.
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I am also under 18 and like to buy things off the internet. This hasn't hindered me as much as some. I have a job and a checking account. Many online merchants accept checks now, but I still run the risk of sending a check through the mail. But worse than that is the time. In the instant online world I do not want to wait days for the USPS to get my check across country.
if the feds got involved, they could probaqbly find you (from the camera, etc).
What's the penalty for wearing a mask in front of the camera?
Just like phone cards, I want to go to a 7-11 and pay cash for a Visa or MasterCard card in $100, $250, or $500 denominations. What's so hard about that?
"The New York Times has an article about a way to anonymously transfer cash online (NYT registration required)."
You mean I actually have to register with the NYT to anonymously transfer cash online?!
WHEN. WILL. IT. STOP?!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
These are particularly great if you are near one of the locations where they are physically sold. It's a Visa card for online (and phone) purchases only, with a 2 year expiration. You have to activate it online, but you can do that from any internet cafe, or through trusted proxies. You have to give a physical address, but it can be totally spoofed. An e-mail address is required, but just use one of the non-obvious disposable ones (i.e. NOT Hotmail, Yahoo). You can recharge it by mailing in a money order.
Be warned, however--if you give a spoofed physical address, you may likely have problems ordering delivered goods to your real physical address (not to mention that such orders obviously compromise your anonymity).
Also, since it is a Visa card, it is subject to any restrictions Visa might adopt (for gambling sites, for example, although I don't know that they do have such restrictions).
This is an extremely poor argument. Your argument would apply the same if we did not have privacy laws, and all of a sudden people proposed having privacy. Using the same logic, because privacy laws helps the boogey-man terrorist immensely, we shouldn't implement them.
Paypal is not anonymous, so how does it compare to this?. Ahhh, it doesn't.
It's not about reliable payment methods, it's about anonymous reliable payment methods.
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