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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?
'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."
I can see the US government blowing a gasket
about quick and easy anonymous money transfer...
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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.
Ok, I'm normally a big proponent of identity freedom on the internet, but I'm having a little trouble justifying this one. I think you need to be able to trace the money trail. I just think there are too many bad uses to justify the few good ones.
How about the fact that it's no different from cash?
It could issue a "temporary credit card" - maybe it could spit out a tempporary card with the number on it, etc, that had the balance of the cash you put in. Basically an anonymous, pre-paid credit card
. You could then use that number like any other card (visa/mastercard/etc). Jsut a thought. The article didn't really specify.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
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
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.
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.
There is a money transfer system called hawala that allows two people in different locations with a means of communication, who trust each other absolutely, to transfer money without the aid of the banking system. Lots of people use it to send money from America to the the Far East - mostly because it is cheaper than Western Union, etc. However, I understand it is being cracked down on because terrorists were using it to move funds around. Still, it will be difficult to shut down completely since it only takes two people and a means of communication to operate. Most of the people who use this system today do so because there is no reasonable alternative (financial system is not good in their area), not because they are terrorists.
I have read that organized crime transfers money from country to country by wiring small amounts (under the amount that must be reported) constantly. Even though there is a paper trail of sorts, it is very hard to sort through. But again, most of the people who wire money are not organized criminals. Should we stop this practice because some of the people are?
Means of moving illegal money secretively already exist. I think the idea with this system is it could allow people to make online purchases, even if they are from an area of the world that does not have the financial systems and identification systems that we take for granted in the West. I am inclined to think the net effect of this would be good. Many people do not have any sort of identification or formal bank account (as required for a service like paypal, which is apparently unavailable in much of the world), but if they could get to a kiosk with some cash, they might be able to order something - provided someone was willing to ship it to them. This could be a big improvement in the lives of many people. It could also help economic growth, facilitating transactions at greater distances and of greater complexity than was possible before.
Should we not build any infrastructure because criminals could use it? Criminals can drive on the roads, too, but that does not mean we stop building them. We police them. This system would have to be policed.
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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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...
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.
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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