Johnny Crytocash
Sneaking sans fraud is a constant game ...
There are times where I’m buying some item and the store wants my contact information, and they’ll fall back to “Sir, I just need your name.” Since I’m typically paying with old fashion folding money, I will just grin and announce that I’m Johnny Cash. This makes Millennials smile a tiny bit, while Zoomers just give me a blank look. Such are the perils of realizing you’re becoming one of the old people.
The online world has no sense of humor in this area, you can’t charm or distract a clerk, and the internet NEVER forgets. As I write this I just spent fifteen minutes looking for the detailed criminal complaint on Ricky Pinedo, the ID theft artist who was charged by the Mueller investigation. The whole world has his plea agreement, but it seems not even I managed to keep the thing that shows the emails that made Paypal accounts with the stolen IDs.
So instead I’m going to wave my hands and show a screen shot from another, more recent case, that of Douglass Mackey, the artist formerly known as “Ricky Vaughn”.
So Ricky made some accounts, feeling safe and secure in his bedroom. The system he used, in this case Twitter, assigned a numeric ID, got his email, IP address at creation time, and a bunch of other information. This is a simple case of acquiring assets compared to what has to be done if money will change hands.
Attention Conservation Notice: If you aren’t in the position of needing to buy things without leaving a trail, you can just skip this one.
Payment Arrangements:
Catching Lyme disease in 2007 pushed me out of the “normal” world of bank accounts and taxes and such. Scuffles with right wing extremists and their corrupt law enforcement enablers have kept me out of sight. I’ve had to find facilitators and develop methods of getting things done that do not expose me. That’s tiresome and I hope it’s finally going to draw to a close just twenty three days from now, when the trial for fees and sanction in Rauhauser v. McGibney will finally happen, a mere 3,541 days after the initial frivolous suit was filed.
So if you’re trying to not leave a trail, as times have gotten harder, the path has become narrower and steeper. Paypal was fine until 2012, when suddenly even if you charged it up with a prepaid card, you’d get dicked around on ID. So forget all about that.
You can purchase prepaid VISA with cash, but you can NOT do so with the assumption that you’re going to just use it like a bank card. If you try to do DoorDash with a Vanilla VISA, you’ll get bounced. If you try to use it in Amazon, it might work, but you’ll get fucked around endlessly while trying to get them to email you a DoorDash gift card. I sprained my knee in July and spent more than a month unable to walk more than a couple hundred yards. That’s some simple IRL stuff, online stuff can range from easier to OMG WTF NO NO NO NO!! And things CAN change from one purchase to the next.
So never, ever presume at the start of a process that you will be able to quickly and easily acquire something you need, not even if it worked yesterday.
Cryptocurrency:
There are endless cryptocurrencies out there, endless web sites and wallets, it’s an ongoing riot of innovation. But you are just a humble disinfo warrior, and your initial needs are simple. So this is what I want you to do.
Go over to Coinbase and get yourself an account.
Get a Monero wallet.
Buy some Monero on Coinbase, then send it to your local wallet.
Start looking for stuff you’d normally buy that will take Monero.
The first step acquires your coins, but in a U.S. system that’s subject to civil and criminal discovery. Monero itself is untraceable, that’s why you’re getting a wallet, which you can easily add to whatever compartment needs to buy something. You’re going to pay for as much other stuff as you can with Monero, so there isn’t a correlation between your USD to XMR and some action you’re trying to do clandestinely.
As was covered in Simulacra & Simultation, if you suddenly “lose” a hot phone in a bad part of town, if the prosecutor can argue that this was intentional concealment on your part, that would be a lovely sentence enhancement, or maybe even an added obstruction charge. If you habitually purchase all sorts of things with Monero and only some of those transactions come with a receipt, that is an entirely different situation.
Conclusion:
This was much more perilous in the old days - try to get some Bitcoin, run it through Helix, and then go off and hope the entity you were dealing with wouldn’t just stiff you. If you were renting a VPS for some shenanigans you had to assume the provider was keeping an eye on it, or that another customer had compromised them, and if you had a good sized cache of crypto you’d get robbed.
Today Coinbase is just a funny sort of bank that will insist on getting your ID before letting you do anything, Monero was designed to not need a tumbler, and there are lots of legitimate places that will take it. I imagine if you’re wanting to rent a VPS for the sake of criming, that’s still a crooked path to walk, but if you’re just nosing around there’s little cause for concern.
Overall this realm is getting more treacherous with each passing day. This is one thing that’s not, but you need to get the accounts in place now, rather than suddenly realizing you need to spend some XMR RIGHT NOW, and finding there’s a five business day delay somewhere in the process.
OK, off you go, and if anyone asks about XMR, you were just trying to get some dwarf tossing pr0n without your significant other discovering your twisted fantasies.