I recently found a prepaid card in my country that has 3-D secure payment support (with a small fee) and was wondering if this is a good setup to pay for Proton Pass, Mullvad, and maybe even online shopping in the future.
I walk to my closest ATM and take about $100 of my local currency out, then a day or two later I go into a shop and put roughly 20usd worth on (plus activation fees) and buy some proton credit through their store (not able to do subscriptions with the card.)
The next day I go into a different store, pay for the same card with the same amount and use it on Mullvad, rinse and repeat every 4ish months. I haven’t tried to purchase this card yet, and if any PII is required then I am definitely not using it for those. But if all goes well, I think this good setup and fits into my threat model.
I’ve also looked at the very small privacy policy on their website and the only thing that stands out is they collect transaction data “to carry out analytics for marketing purposes, in aggregated anonymized form” and share that with “marketing and analytics partners” with no names mentioned. Could this be a issue at all?
I thought I would share and get some feedback in-case I am missing anything important!
Thanks for reading c:
Yeah a lot of companies “anonymize” data but its quite easy to de-anonymize it (from what I have read about on the topic) I can send Mullvad cash but the only issue is sending cash is prohibited in my country, and from what I have seen online there is a low success rate in general with sending cash in my country, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try it though with a small amount, maybe ill get lucky c:
Proton is a more complex situation, I can’t send cash (not supported currency) and I’m honestly a bit afraid to touch crypto.. It seems quite hard to find a place where I can directly get monero without KYC
Lets say I get the card in cash and no PII is required, great. I then go to purchase something online, and lets say the payment processor is Stripe and require KYC, how do they get this?
I would assume with the cardholder name, but with the prepaid cards in my country they just say to put “cardholder name” when using it to purchase stuff online. I tried this with a different provider but they don’t support 3D Secure System, so I can’t validate that. I can’t see a way that they are able to link it back to my identity, but I probably am missing something
I would assume this to be the case, I believe its the same as debit cards in my country? Although that might vary slightly between banks, not sure. I will have a look at the Whonix Documentation as well, thanks c:
Edit: also thanks for the RetoSwap recommendation, I will have a look into it!
Typically you will be required to provide valid personal information, such as shipping address and a phone number, along with a recipient name. In addition, if you are trying to process a transaction in Europe from abroad, there are further restrictions on unregistered prepaid cards that limit the maximum spending amount per transaction:
If the provided personal information is not valid, or if the transaction is flagged as suspicious by the third-party payment processor, then it will be declined.
I actually should have thought of this myself.. one of those days I guess xD
Also this is quite fascinating, I don’t know much about europe’s laws (because im not from there) but handy to know for potential future use cases.
Anyways I shall stop talking about this; after thinking about the “anonymize data” more, it kinda ruins it all. But thanks for the help! I think ill look into getting monero instead, do some research, and probably make a post asking how my planned set-up is
