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It’s 2016, and stuffing cash in an envelope and mailing it to a small island nation is sometimes still the best way to move money with some degree of privacy.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopia I was promised.
A credit security freeze denies access to your credit file. I first learned about it last summer from Brian Krebs, but didn’t implement it until a couple months later. It took me about 45 minutes and $20 to activate the freeze with the five major credit bureaus. This goes a long way to reducing the threat of identify theft, with very little energy expenditure required. A proactive defense is superior to reactive monitoring services. If you need your credit pulled monthly or more frequently, constantly freezing and unfreezing your file would probably be an annoying inconvenience. For the rest of us, I’m not sure if there is any good reason not to enable the freeze.
Brian Krebs’ recent experience highlights PayPal’s insecurity. The convenience and ease of use of PayPal give them a wide customer base, but their inherent untrustworthiness has long been reason for concern. For as long as I’ve used the service, I’ve been concerned about external attacks, like what Krebs experienced, as well as the internal threat – PayPal themselves have a history of freezing and diverting their users’ funds. Both of these concerns can be addressed via a proxy bank.
In 2008 I opened an online checking account with a new bank, completely separate from the financial institutions I normally use. The account has no “overdraft protection” or any line of credit. As with my PayPal account, I keep no money in the checking account. This checking account is the only account I associate with PayPal. When I want to make a purchase via PayPal, I transfer the needed funds from my primary financial institution to the checking account at the proxy bank. Since banks still subscribe to the archaic notion of “business days”, this transfer can sometime take up to week, but more frequently completes within 2-3 days.
The brief wait period is acceptable to me (it certainly reduces the ability to impulse buy) and gives me a level of security that otherwise cannot be achieved with PayPal. If someone breaks into my PayPal account, there’s nothing for them to steal. Even PayPal themselves have limited ability to steal funds. If an attacker is lucky, they may gain access to the account when I’m transferring funds in preparation for a purchase. My PayPal transactions are typically low-value, so at most this lucky attacker will acquire $100 or so. That’s an acceptable risk for the convenience of PayPal.
In the past I used this multilayer approach for all online purchases. A debit card from a proxy checking account at a different bank with no access to my primary accounts was the only thing I would use to make online purchases. When the account was compromised, the wait period for a new card wasn’t the inconvenience it normally is, since it had no impact on my day-to-day spending with my primary accounts. I think this type of security is required for shopping online, but responsible use of a credit card can offer acceptable protection for non-PayPal transactions without the hassle of a proxy account.
I have previously mentioned prepaid debit cards. On ITS I discuss using prepaid debit cards for anonymous, cash-like digital transactions a bit more in-depth.
In the essay he introduces the website and describes his experience as a user purchasing illegal drugs. It is well worth the read. I’ve spent hours on his website perusing his other works.
Their prepaid Visa and American Express gift cards can be purchased with cash at any Simon mall. No identification is required. To use the card with online merchants, you will likely need to register the card with an address so that it can pass AVS checks. This can be done through Tor with fake information.
When I first learned about the Bitcoin currency a few years ago, it didn’t excite me. A purely digital currency tied to no material good seemed an interesting project, but I didn’t see that it could have the practical value of, say, a digital gold currency. When the media blitz occurred last year I took another look and reached the same conclusion. A few months later I realized I was looking at the currency all wrong: bitcoins are not a value-store, they’re a means of exchange.
It doesn’t matter that Bitcoins are the digital equivalent of a fiat currency, with no inherent value. It doesn’t matter if their value fluctuates in relation to other currencies. There’s no reason to store wealth in Bitcoins (unless you’re a gambler). When you need to send money, purchase some Bitcoins and send them. When you need to receive money, accept Bitcoins and exchange them immediately for another currency. The value of the bitcoins only need to remain stable for the amount of time it takes to complete a transaction.
I’m no Bitcoin evangelist. I have my reservations about the currency. But one common critique that consistently angers me is that bitcoins are not secure because there have been instances of theft. This is equivalent to claiming that Federal Reserve Notes are insecure because people get mugged. Secure your shit.