I bought a prepaid topup credit card. To use it, I needed to set it up in an app which asked for my name, address, etc. I answered fictitiously. I was told that ID verification was needed to access all functionality.
I made my first payment through paypal successfully.
I then topped up by a larger amount and tried to make another payment. It didn’t work. It said my account was suspended until I verified ID.
I posted on a local finance forum to ask if I could get my money back.
The moderator deleted my post and blocked my account for the same reason he said my credit card account was blocked: money laundering.
Be careful playing around with fake names when it comes to handling money… You may not be doing anything illegal, but people will think you are.
Now I lost money and am afraid I am flagged to the cops. I left enough trace for them to deanonymize me. I didn’t break the law, but my effort to be private made me suspicious and perhaps worth investigating, causing me to be much less private.
I don’t think I’ll try this again. Never going to try obtain monero for example… because there must be cops closely watching anyone who tries to obtain it.
Of course. Any traditional banking transaction require kyc. Theres really no anonymity when dealing with those.
What i did was to use virtual card to compartmentalize. Similar concept to email alias. If 1 card number leak or being sold, others are still properly segregated. Obviously to register for such cards involves traditional bank so kyc is still there.
Some country allow buying anon preloaded prepaid cards too from convenience store, maybe thats an option if yours got that. Mine doesn’t, they’ll ask for copy of id at the cashier.
I’m sorry you got burned. The whole situation sucks.
I haven’t really done much in this line myself but I have thought about this a bit, if only as an intellectual exercise. Just offering a few random thoughts in case they are helpful or stimulate discussion:
If you are going to be easily traceable by the police or other authorities, it’s probably not worth it. If you are topping up your fake ID prepaid card using a Paypal or bank account in your real name, you’re just getting a little bit of isolation from “casual” commercial surveillance and it’s not worth the crap you’re going through now. This isolation is nice but using things like virtual cards - available even in my non-privacy friendly country, at least - is nearly as good from this point of view. Similarly, if you’re ordering physical goods and don’t have a reasonably anonymous way of receiving them, there’s already a strong link to your identity there.
For online purchases (digital media, online services) where you don’t need a physical delivery address, crypto is a good option, or maybe you can purchase site-specific gift cards in a shop with cash and use them to pay on the website.
Unless you’ve got some really pressing need for privacy (someone is stalking you or something equally serious), and you’re “just” doing this because you’re sick of being tracked and monitored (I totally get that), I think you have to restrict yourself to amounts of money that you are willing to lose if things go wrong.
I think there might be some possibility of getting anonymous physical delivery via things like Amazon lockers or “click & collect” services, but there is always a chance the vendor is going to flag your account as suspicious and you either lose your money or have to give up your identity. (I think one of Michael Bazzell’s books might discuss this, and I’m sure it’s been discussed elsewhere too.) As long as you haven’t done anything illegal, this needn’t be the end of the world - when it works, you still regained a little bit of privacy (and the associated satisfaction, which is perhaps worth more than the practical benefits).
If you do need to give fake details - e.g. a name associated with an Amazon locker delivery - consider giving a mangled-but-plausible variant on your real details. Introduce a couple of typos in your name, perhaps use a variation on it which sounds like someone might have misheard it when you told it them over the phone, something like that. That way if you do have to start showing ID, you have plausible deniability that you were doing anything involving fake ID. If the only data the vendor has is your mangled name and maybe the city you’re in, for commercial surveillance purposes they are not going to be able to tie the purchase to your real identity. (This may also be from one of MB’s books.)