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693 points hienyimba | 9 comments | | HN request time: 1.368s | source | bottom
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jeroenhd ◴[] No.28523473[source]
Offtopic but I'm amazed you can legally hand out free (virtual) credit cards like these without anything close to a banking license.

The sales pitch, to pay for services anonymously, would make it trivial to use this service for money laundering. I hope the website is lying about how private those transactions really are.

I'm also a little sketched out by the fact the business resides in Wyoming while the person writing the blog says that Stripe wasn't available "in my country". The company has two directors, both of which are a vague "Cloud Peak Law" company which owns a bunch of unrelated LLCs, but no reference to any foreign owners. That's not very confidence inspiring either, in my opinion. I can find a similarly named company from Nigeria but there's no clear connection between the two.

Edit: the company's Cloud Peak Law P.C. "director" is a service used by a Wyoming company set up specifically to allow anonymous registration of a business, set up there specifically because anonymous businesses are allowed by the state. I wouldn't be surprised if one of this law company's other clients used their anonymous-business-as-a-service for something sketchy, causing Stripe to go up the chain and mark the entire Cloud Peak Law "person" as unreliable and disputed. After all, going by the public record, the company is actually run by this law company, not the person writing this blog post. That may be why Stripe is able to claim a dispute that doesn't exist in their own management system. I don't know if that's the reason, of course, because there's little transparency from other side here.

I don't think Stripe should be lying about the nonexistent disputes, but if I were to design a money laundering detection algorithm, this kind of stuff is exactly what I would watch out for. I'm guessing Stripe's machine learning triggered on this company and that they just picked a random TOS bullet point to end the contract by knowing that you won't be able to sue them for it anyway.

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Chilinot ◴[] No.28523590[source]
I'm not entirely sure how you would launder money through this service. From what i can tell no money is actually passed through it. It just generates a temporary credit card which is never billed. It is just used to bypass the "please enter your credit card for this free trial" prompts.
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1. jeroenhd ◴[] No.28523614[source]
I'm talking specifically about this type of card: https://justuseapp.com/privacy-card

That looks like it definitely allows transactions.

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2. Chilinot ◴[] No.28523694[source]
Ah, yes that is sketchy.
replies(1): >>28525923 #
3. sofixa ◴[] No.28523710[source]
I don't see them claiming they don't keep track of the transactions, so what's the problem? It's just a temporary card so the merchant doesn't know your original one, but in case of problems the intermediary still knows who you are, what your original card is, and who you paid to.
4. illwrks ◴[] No.28523752[source]
Isn't this just a standard top-up card?
replies(1): >>28525514 #
5. valdiorn ◴[] No.28525514[source]
yes, except it is generated and maintained by a faceless, nameless holding company in the US.

I'm a businessman trying to hide my wealth, I get one of these cards and top it up with 100k from my CAyman islands bank account, and use it for all my daily spending. That's a very common method of tax evasion.

Strip could now be on the hook for facilitating this, which means they need to trust justuseapp to do proper KYC that complies with global anti money laundering policies, etc. That is a HUGE task, and if they get it wrong, the consequences are serious. So, when stripe says they're worried; they're right to be.

The intented use of this companies service might be altruistic, but it's really easily absued for nefarious purposes.

replies(1): >>28526137 #
6. 0xdeadb00f ◴[] No.28525923[source]
Is it? How is it any different from something like Privacy.com?
7. hienyimba ◴[] No.28526137{3}[source]
This is not possible. You cannot fund your account with more than $30 per day unless you are have the highest verification and right now, the limit at those levels is just $60.

It will take you years to move $100k at $60 per day.

replies(1): >>28528852 #
8. fragmede ◴[] No.28528852{4}[source]
It's entirely possible for an attacker with 100 stolen identities to make 100 $30/day accounts and move $3,000/day. or $6,000/day if they've stolen the person's government ID. It'll take just over 2 weeks to move $100k at that rate.
replies(1): >>28529428 #
9. diebeforei485 ◴[] No.28529428{5}[source]
They could do this with literally any prepaid card, though.