
Ask HN: How do illegal online services charge money? - evex
How do online services that break other&#x27;s TOS&#x27;s charge money? how do they not get locked out of there money
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hackermailman
Redirects to false front stores when you click on 'Buy fake Chanel' so you're
actually paying notillegal.biz instead of veryillegal.biz directly. This
scheme eventually is caught so they keep buying new domains and using new high
risk processors. They could even be running the high risk processor
themselves, if it's a successful enough illegal operation, then just reboot
the scheme after being shut down.

Another way is they invent some third party payment scheme. 'This site accepts
Foo vouchers and Foo gamer gold' for a ficticious game, and of course they
also run the site that sells said gamer gold or vouchers for cc payments and
helpfully link the buyers to it. If you're a criminal involved in organized
crime you don't care about forgery and fraud setting up many phony entities to
misdirect payments for as long as possible to a labyrinthe of deception until
discovered.

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ggm
Predation by crooks on each other online is not uncommon. You read of people
selling password lists falling for obvious scams.

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evex
This is individuals selling so they can charge manually e.g. Western Union,
I'm talking about services that use an online payment gateway to process
credit cards :)

~~~
ggm
There was a piece here last week about porn pay. they pay hienous intermediate
fees and masquerade as non porn and are basically at risk of being shut down
as money laundering.

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m1573rp34130dy
i wonder what would be worse... not paying taxes on revenue, or creating a
parallel currency... when does mutual contras, vouchers, barter, bitcoin,
etherium cross the line? what about CPU time slices, or mesh nodes, or .pdf
payloads?

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jackkinsella
Cryptocurrency is often used in these circumstances, as there is (usually) no
centralized body with the power to lock the law-breaking party out of their
funds.

