55

For someone who values anonymity and privacy, what is the recommended way to pay on the Internet?

Example: To buy a domain or a VPN or another service

I know that we can use cryptocurrencies, but at some point, you need to buy cryptocurrency using a traditional currency.

Peter Mortensen
  • 877
  • 5
  • 10
DxTx
  • 1,403
  • 2
  • 9
  • 20
  • 5
    If you don't want a domain for a service you're hosting for others but just for yourself to contact your own server, you can go for a free subdomain. There are several of these free services. Apart from saving a small amount of money, the advantages are that your name doesn't appear in some DNS registrar's database and that you don't leave identifying information in a money trail because there is no money trail. – UTF-8 Apr 07 '19 at 21:11
  • @DxTx why would you want to buy a domain name? It's the inverse of privacy (registrar requires personal information that are publicly accessible via WHOIS). – zakinster Apr 08 '19 at 07:54
  • @zakinster I use that as an example. But there are ways to run a website anonymously, right? ([Link01](https://www.hostingadvice.com/how-to/best-anonymous-web-hosting/), [Link02](https://uncensoredhosting.com/anonymous-hosting-reviews/)) – DxTx Apr 08 '19 at 08:24
  • 22
    I personally defend the valuable topic of right to anonymity. But I shall also point out that regardless of any legitimate reason, the sole *ability to transfer money anonymously* opens the gate to money laundering and funding to either terrorist groups, mafia, Wikileaks etc. So there will always be forces trying to prevent each of us from transacting (*truly*) anonymously. – usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ Apr 08 '19 at 11:47
  • 3
    @zakinster, private domain registration where the name of a proxy company is listed rather than your info is super common when registering domain names and most (all?) registrars provide that service. If you register with your real info, you will get spammed to death. – JPhi1618 Apr 08 '19 at 17:55
  • I haven't bought cryptocurrency with traditional currency in years. I have clients pay me in crypto. – Michael Hampton Apr 08 '19 at 18:22
  • 2
    Some services, such as “posteo.de”, go to [great lengths](https://posteo.de/en/site/features#featuresprivacy) to protect your privacy by *not* collecting your name or (other) email address during sign up, allowing for anonymous payments, not logging your IP address, etc. But specifically for those reasons, they don’t support custom domains for your email address, either. Another example is “gandi.net”, which accepts [payments in Bitcoin](https://news.gandi.net/en/2015/10/Now-Accepting-Bitcoin/). Anyway, you may leak information otherwise and may have to trust your provider nevertheless. – caw Apr 08 '19 at 20:17
  • 2
    You do know that you can wash cryptocurrencies easily right? Just buy them with your name and send it through coin tumbler, preferably with a delay above 3 days – Hobbamok Apr 09 '19 at 08:46
  • 2
    **What is your threat model?** Do you simply want random Joe on the 'net to not see by default who the domain belongs to? Or do you want to hide from targeted attack by individual who is willing to spend some money to bribe ISP employee to see if you bought the domain? Are you PirateBay and trying to evade some coorp with lots of money and political influence? Or are you like Snowden and trying to save you life from goverment bent to destroy you? Answer depends on that. You can do it in 5 minutes for almost free, or it can take years and tens of thousands of dollars spent to hide it better – Matija Nalis Apr 10 '19 at 10:27

8 Answers8

60

To protect your privacy and avoid tracking, nothing beats cash.

There are various services that let you purchase credits in cash at a brick and mortar store, which you can then later use to purchase goods and services online.

One example is paysafecard (I haven't tried it, but you should also be able to buy bitcoin with cash). There are a number of VPN providers which accept these payments.

Alternatively, you could simply purchase your VPN access directly offline at a store.

There are also domain registrars which accept these payment methods, but most will ask for identifying information (name, address, etc) when registering a domain. So if you want to conform with registrars TOS, registering a domain anonymously wouldn't be possible. You can hide your information from third parties by requesting that your registrar doesn't disclose the information, violate the TOS by providing false information (not recommended), or find a registrar or third party service that does not request this information.

scohe001
  • 1,035
  • 2
  • 7
  • 13
tim
  • 29,018
  • 7
  • 95
  • 119
  • 30
    Some stores also offer prepaid debit cards that you can buy with cash and use anywhere online, I believe. – ave Apr 07 '19 at 20:19
  • 1
    Is it possible they can link your paysafecard to the store where it was bought? which can then use security footage and transaction history to track down location, time, and image (cctv)? – Keatinge Apr 08 '19 at 02:09
  • 1
    @Ave - [Here's an example of that](https://usa.visa.com/pay-with-visa/cards/prepaid-cards.html#2). That's really the best option - cash for a card that's good (almost) everywhere. – Bobson Apr 08 '19 at 04:24
  • 7
    @Keatinge - That is possible - in order to activate anything like that, whoever is issuing it needs to know who sold it, so they know that it's a valid activation (and not fraud). From that, it's certainly possible to work backwards to the specific transaction. But I'm fairly sure that most CCTV in stores is on a rewriting loop. If you let your cards sit long enough (which could be anywhere from a week to a year, at least), then the video will get overwritten and there won't be any useful records left. – Bobson Apr 08 '19 at 04:26
  • 1
    IMHO the only correct answer. Cash is the only anonymous currency exchange we have, because the actual anonymous digital currencies of the cypherpunk years have been replaced by Bitcoin and such like. – Tom Apr 08 '19 at 10:59
  • 7
    @Keatinge: CCTV is the outdated threat model there. You have cell phone position records kept by towers, license plate readers, etc. etc. etc. whose data will likely never get overwritten, and which will tie the buyer to the time and location of the sale, if any of them apply to the buyer. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Apr 08 '19 at 15:20
  • 6
    @Tom Cash is only anonymous by convention and not really by any inherent property. People have been recording serial numbers and marking bills as long as cash has existed. It is definitely within modern technology to use high speed scanners to record serial numbers every time cash moves through a bank, and you can imagine ATMs recording serial numbers as they dispense cash. – user71659 Apr 08 '19 at 16:59
  • FWIW, I tried to buy a paysafecard in Texas and couldn't find it anywhere regardless of what their website said. I think its more of a European thing from what I could tell, but then again I never found one so... – JPhi1618 Apr 08 '19 at 17:57
  • 2
    @user71659 that is a good comment. So to add: Spend only cash that you've received from a human, preferably in a small shop. – Tom Apr 09 '19 at 04:12
  • This is also a vector that's becoming less usable, for exactly these reasons. For example in Germany it's already mandatory to present a government issued ID when purchasing a paysafecard with cash. – kasoban Apr 09 '19 at 09:48
  • @kasoban That's only for cards over 100 Euro, which should be enough to buy a VPN or domain. And you could of course buy a couple of cards from different locations. – tim Apr 09 '19 at 10:09
  • 4
    @R.. When you are worried about anonymity, you could just leave your phone at home. – tim Apr 09 '19 at 10:11
  • 2
    @user71659 No, cash is inherently anonymous. When you go to a store and get change, the cashier doesn't record the serial number of the banknote (and coins don't even have serial numbers); requiring to record serial numbers on every cash transaction would not be practical. – tim Apr 09 '19 at 10:14
  • @user71659 while the bank may use a machine to count bills and scan serial numbers when dispensing cash, I've never seen one at a retail outlet in the US. I _have_ seen some stores (Walmart, I believe) that have a machine that checks for various security features in larger bills ($20 and up) that could _also_ scan the serial number (and potentially associate it with the current purchase), but simply avoiding those stores and/or $20 or larger bills will eliminate that issue. – FreeMan Apr 09 '19 at 13:19
  • @JPhi1618 Thankfully I feel like they're also on the recline in Germany / Europe. Haven't seen a store stock them in quite some time. – towe Apr 09 '19 at 13:27
  • @R.. anybody who cares about privacy ought to know better than to keep their cell phone on them... – Harper - Reinstate Monica Apr 09 '19 at 16:29
  • This isn't anonymous is it. You usually have to provide either identification (for like, your name on the card) or your phone number. As @Bobson pointed out it would be foolish to think that using one of these cards make you anonymous. Now use it from a computer or network that can be traced back to you as well and you continue to see how anonymous these cards actually are. Now maybe if you get someone to buy one of the cards for you. Finally, doing transactions in unusual ways makes you stand out more, not less. But if the transaction is perfectly anonymous I guess you don't have to worry. – user875234 Apr 09 '19 at 17:25
  • 1
    There are people who buy and activate prepaid debit cards and prepaid phones and phone cards and resell them. The purchase and activation are associated with that person and decoupled from the ultimate purchaser who uses cash and makes the purchase in a separate venue. This is anonymous as long as you can trust the middleman to not spill the beans. A risk in this situation is that the expiration clock, if any, starts running at the time of activation and the validity will be shorter for the user. – Dennis Williamson Apr 09 '19 at 22:51
  • @DennisWilliamsonbut where do you find such a person and how do you pay them? You buy bitcoin using something like local bitcoin giving you semi-clean BTC. Then you use that to buy a card from the middleman on the darknet? That seems viable most of the time but like you said you still have to trust the middle man. – user875234 Apr 10 '19 at 12:40
27

Using a VPN won't make you anonymous.

The owner of the VPN service will still knows who you are from the origin IP address.

In the past several VPN providers that stated that everything was anonymous in fact released all the information they had to the FBI and US Department of Justice. It makes sense that they are not private; if you commit a crime using their systems and they cannot point to the perpetrator of the crime then they might be held liable.

For the crypto currencies, you do not need to buy them; you can mine them. Also some crypto-currencies have a higher level of privacy than others.

At the moment the best possible way to make you private in some of the internet traffic is still Tor as long you follow their best practice.

The other way to be private in the internet is if you steal someonelse's digital identity. This is the most common means used by thieves.

forest
  • 64,616
  • 20
  • 206
  • 257
Hugo
  • 1,701
  • 11
  • 12
  • 1
    You should also be careful to mine them anonymously, i.e. put your mining node behind Tor anyways – usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ Apr 08 '19 at 11:48
  • 3
    @usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ Lots of tor exit nodes are controlled by intelligence organizations. There's always a limit to security. – Tomáš Zato - Reinstate Monica Apr 08 '19 at 13:06
  • Some VPNs have no-logs policy, but of course it's a matter of trust. – Dmitry Grigoryev Apr 08 '19 at 16:00
  • 3
    @TomášZato [citation needed] **That's a common rumor**, but the fact is, the highest-bandwidth exit nodes that make up more than 60% of the exit network are run by people and organizations who are well-known. Even though there are a _few_ malicious nodes, it would take a very large sybil attack (which would be very noticeable) to actually deanonymize _en masse_ using traffic correlation attacks. – forest Apr 08 '19 at 21:32
  • I suppose using someone else's identity _would_ provide _you_ with anonymity. – FreeMan Apr 09 '19 at 13:21
  • @forest There is records of such an attack on Tor that went unnoticed for months in 2014. Source : [1](https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack) [2](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/active-attack-on-tor-network-tried-to-decloak-users-for-five-months/) – Justin Apr 09 '19 at 16:53
  • @JustinLessard It's Tor, not TOR, and those attacks were exploiting a specific and severe bug (which has long since been fixed). Those were not caused by any intrinsic issues with Tor itself. – forest Apr 09 '19 at 16:54
  • @Dmitry Grigoryev there is no guarantee they do not allow surveillance, or that third parties are not keeping logs, or that "keys" (even a portion) are not shared. They say "we do not keep logs", not necessarily that no logs will exist. – mckenzm Apr 10 '19 at 01:22
17

You could use xmr.to for that. According to them:

XMR.TO allows you to make a Bitcoin payment with the strong privacy provided by Monero. This means that using Monero together with XMR.TO, you can pay any Bitcoin address in the world while protecting your privacy.

You buy Monero, a privacy-centric coin, send to xmr.to with the destination Bitcoin address, they sell your Monero, buy Bitcoin, and send to the host. Xmr.to a well known service, and lots of people uses it every day.

Their FAQ is pretty informative, and you should read it.

ThoriumBR
  • 50,648
  • 13
  • 127
  • 142
11

You could buy gift cards with cash then sell them for bitcoin on r/GiftCardExchange

Alex Palumbo
  • 117
  • 2
5

You can trade cryptocurrencies with other cryptocurrencies and the trails become cold fast if you use random amounts. More iterations with independent wallets makes it even harder to trace. E.g.

  1. Buy BTC.
  2. Transfer some of the BTC (not all) to another wallet.
  3. Exchange BTC to another cryptocurrency.
  4. Transfer some of that to another wallet.
  5. Exchange back to BTC.
  6. Repeat steps 2 to 5.

The trick is that

  • on cryptocurrency transfers it's unclear whether it's your own or someone else's wallet.
  • cryptocurrency exchange with independent amounts is untraceable, because it's not the same coins anymore.

Of course you lose some money in the process and it takes some time and effort. That's the price for such anonymity. Sadly the same methods that are used for money laundering applies to making payments truly anonymous.

Esa Jokinen
  • 16,100
  • 5
  • 50
  • 55
  • 15
    I wouldn't trust that. The ledgers are open and it's only a matter of effort to put things together, an effort that can be automated and I would be surprised if law enforcement and other interested parties haven't done so already. There are, however, mixers who will take money from many sources and send it out to many sources, mixing it up so that no connection between sender and receiver can be made. Similar to the old anonymous mail mixers. If you chain a couple of them in various jurisdictions, maybe you have a chance. No idea how many of them are sting operations, though. – Tom Apr 07 '19 at 22:24
  • @Tom the problem with mixers is that you would then take part and appear in other money trails that may not be as innocent or well-intentioned as OP... – zakinster Apr 08 '19 at 08:02
  • @Tom: if done poorly, that's possible. I added some clarification to the correct method. – Esa Jokinen Apr 08 '19 at 08:38
  • 3
    I disagree that independent amounts make you untraceable. That is only true if the wallets involved have many other, unrelated, transactions. Hence, mixers. Remember that tracing doesn't have to be perfect unless you want to use it as evidence in a court of law. If I'm a three letter agency, or organized crime, a reasonably high degree of confidence that two transactions are related is enough. I can easily develop tools that will trace over multiple intermediate steps and keep track of confidence ratings. – Tom Apr 08 '19 at 10:33
  • 1
    Mixing and splitting only increase the CPU power needed to trace funds; they do not make it impossible. – WGroleau Apr 08 '19 at 11:40
  • 1
    Don't mix them yourself, since you're only combining your own money and all paths lead to you... Use a [tumbler service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler). As an example a popular Bitcoin Cash wallet has one built-in now: https://cashshuffle.com. The way these work is by making a many-to-many transaction with a lot of peoples moneis and adding a random fee so you can't link back by matching transfer amounts. With 100 of people in a single transaction it becomes very hard to link back to you. – csiz Apr 08 '19 at 13:28
  • @csiz Even those services are not perfect due to the public nature of the blockchain. I believe there is some research from the intelligence community in tracking down mixer transactions. – forest Apr 08 '19 at 21:31
  • @Tom, I agree with you but I'm compelled to play devils advocate against your first comment. There totally could be some software out there that allows you to "query" data from various blockchains but in my experience even the obvious software that you think shoudl exist and be easy to use is often hard to find (or trust) and of surprisingly low quality. Like, I'd actually be impressed if there were software that let you query the bitcoin blockchain (for example, give me all wallets created in this data range, then out of those give me all common receiving addresses, up to 100 transactions). – user875234 Apr 10 '19 at 12:45
  • Then throw in other currencies that people haven't made such analysis tool for and I can see how although it would be technically possible to collate that data it would be practically impossible. Like you think they really have their act together but I would bet they use the same software that everyone else uses. Thus, while I do agree with you it would not surprise me at all to learn that no one has the ability to get a clear picture of what's going on across multiple blockchains....now maybe in the future they could hook up some kind of AI to it and discover your identity... – user875234 Apr 10 '19 at 12:50
  • @user875234 if it is technically possible, then all that is needed is sufficient incentive for someone to make it practically possible. – Tom Apr 10 '19 at 19:13
4

For obtaining an anonymous source of payment from a cash source you can buy pre-paid debit cards.

Many times you can also get free services for hosting and domain registration; for example, TLDs such as .tk and .ga are (as of this writing) free of charge via FreeNOM.

fluffy
  • 1,342
  • 1
  • 8
  • 10
-2

Find a legal way to run a crypto miner on someone else's computer. One way to do this would be to offer crypto mining as a payment option for whatever service you are offering. Now you have clean cash so long as you are an expert in computer networking and haven't left a trail a mile long from doing things like setting up your wallet, not having your cache cleared, not being on a computer and network you trust, being on a computer that could be tied to you (e.g. by monitor size). As I understand it you shouldn't even consider doing any of this without Tails (all connections go through TOR).

Now all you have to do is receive your item anonymously. How you do this depends on your item but I've heard people just use the regular postal service for this.

user875234
  • 169
  • 5
  • That's not going to get you much money... You'd need a pretty damn massive botnet if you want to pay someone more than a few fractions of a cent. – forest Apr 09 '19 at 17:52
  • Yeah, you are right. But I believe my answer is still technically correct. – user875234 Apr 09 '19 at 17:55
  • It'd be correct if you had an insane amount of computer power. In reality though, mining is _not_ an effective way to make money. A couple months of mining and you might be able to buy a toothpick... – forest Apr 09 '19 at 17:57
  • Mining is not an effective way to make money when anonymity isn't your primary concern. – user875234 Apr 09 '19 at 18:05
  • Even if it is your primary concern, it's not an effective way to make money. Not unless you own a very large botnet (i.e. an _illegal_ way). Crypto mining has stopped being profitable for us _years_ ago. – forest Apr 09 '19 at 18:06
  • You mean bitcoin mining. Crypto mining in general can still be profitable depending on the currency you use, no? Or maybe it all equalizes out in the crypto-space as a whole. I'm not exactly sure. I know monero is specifically designed to be mineable on CPUs. – user875234 Apr 09 '19 at 18:10
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/92212/discussion-between-forest-and-user875234). – forest Apr 09 '19 at 18:11
-5

nothing beats bitcoin. so far, it's the meta anonymous coin to be used on the internet. you can probably use it to possibly buy a disposable credit card. but it's not a good idea. VPN companies aren't mostly trusted imo, and those that are have a shitty product.

you want anonymity online? do what everyone does - TOR and bitcoin. simple enough.

blahh
  • 15
  • 1
  • 14
    Bitcoin is not anonymous... – forest Apr 08 '19 at 03:01
  • 3
    As @forest commented, Bitcoin is explicitly not anonymous, which is why criminals use other cryptocurrencies which are anonymous to hide the money trail. – Rory Alsop Apr 08 '19 at 08:23
  • since when? that's debatable. just because you have to buy it from non-anonymous sources doesn't make it non-anonymous. – blahh Apr 11 '19 at 02:13
  • someone has to give you the cryptocurrency. you usually have to give other kinds of money back. that transaction is sometimes not anonymous. bitcoin is anonymous. – blahh Apr 11 '19 at 02:16