Anonymous debit card?

In the previous post we covered some  e-currency anonymous payment options like WebMoney and LibertyReserve. In this post we will talk about anonymous debit cards which can be used for online purchases.

Privacy on the Internet has become a great concern lately due to so many evil tracking tools now readily available. Evesdropping software that allows to listen to someone’s cell phone conversations right at your computer’s desk is one such recent shocking innovation.

Since most merchants do not widely accept e-currencies, there is a need for an online anonymous prepaid debit card. Clearly, there is no such thing as an anonymous credit card – how would a bank give someone a loan without even knowing that someone’s first name? Nonsense aside, what are some working alternatives?

Anonymous debit cards can be purchased online – you can get the card’s number, CVC and expiration date by email right after payment. These cards may be used for online purchases on many websites but are also known to be declined by certain online businesses like PayPal, for example. So, before you buy such a card, you need to make sure that it is going to work with the vendor of interest to you. Well, trial and error is certainly an option too.

Such virtual prapaid cards cannot be possibly used for payments at physical locations like gas stations, for example. They are virtual cards.

My recent experience showed that there are some prepaid cards which you can buy at Walgreens and many other popular convenience stores and actually use them for both offline and online payments absolutely anonymously. I went straight to Walgreens and bought a $25 value AMEX gift card which cost me a bit over $28. Then I tried it at Starbucks and with a cup of nice green tea I then logged in on the Internet and made a purchase online without any issues. What did I put for the billing address? I used a virtual person’s name and address since the card was not associated with any real person. Was I asked to show any identification documents at check-out? No and I paid with cash.

The only inconvenience this card has is that it cannot be used outside the United States and it cannot be used at ATMs for cash withdrawals. I paid with it online to a US merchant so it is still an open question whether it is possible to make payments on non US websites.

Domain Registration Private

There has been a lot of discussion about domain private registrations. And as it turns out, many questions still remain. What is the best place to get your domain private registration? What are reasonable prices? Do private domains come with anonymous NameServers in WHOIS? What are private WHOIS? Can a private domain be turned public later on? Is it possible to lose a private domain? Why would I need a domain registration private? What are some benefits? What are the drawbacks? Should I opt for an offshore private domain registry? Do I need to provide any of my personal details when registering a private domain name? Below, we clarify these points of confusion.

First, the purpose of a private registration is to protect your privacy online. Offshore domain registries are located in jurisdictions where privacy has been written into laws. Such registrars usually do not require any personal details from its clients. And domain registration is usually a one click process that only needs your email. YoHOST.ORG offers one click private domain registration.

The prices for domain private registration usually range within the $15-25 band for most common domain names per year. Some exotic names like .tv come at a higher rate. The major benefit of a private domain registration is anonymous or private NameServers which look like ns1.findnames.com and ns2.findnames.com in WHOIS. These allow you to manage your domain by only changing the IP of your web host. IPs usually propagate fast and offer a hassle-free domain management solution. Whether you host on a shared or dedicated IP, you can always point your private domain to it within seconds and still keep anonymous NameServers in WHOIS.

The private WHOIS details are those of your private domain registry. If it is an offshore registrar located, say, in Panama, there will be the Panamian address, phone number and fax number. All inquiries about your domain will have to go through your private registrar. In this way you can avoid scam and spam emails about your domain. Serious inquiries will be forwarded to you by the registrar to your email.

At any time you may replace the private registrar’s details with your own or those of your company for your private domain. This gives you a lot of flexibility in managing your private and public information. If you work with trusted private registrars, there is no way you can lose your domain and offshore registrars actually add a higher level of security and privacy for you. There are no drawbacks for private domain registrations. It does not affect your domain’s search engine rankings, your admission to affiliate programs, etc. In fact, domain registration private gives you more flexibility, security and, of course, privacy online.

Offshore streaming video hosting

It has long been realized that offshore servers, though fast and reliable, are in many instances slow for hosting streaming videos. The reason is simply remoteness of offshore data centers from the mainland. The pings travel under the sea to European and US visitors making rich contents upload at very slow rates. Tracert-ing most offshore hosting sites will reveal a long tail of nodes that the signal has to pass before reaching your PC. Recently, however, this problem has been given more attention as the demand for offshore anonymous video hosting rose rapidly. Some offshore providers decided to invest more in bandwidth and offer dedicated bandwidth solutions – at steep prices compared to most mainland hosting companies. This solution definitely makes life easier for many rich graphic content websites. Images load better and faster with dedicated bandwidth. Even 1 Mbs dedicated bandwidth is more than enough for many image-rich offshore sites to load quite fast.

Another approach focused on outsourcing rich video and image hosting to fast file hosters. Then using the direct download links for such files, you can feed them into your streaming video player that you use for your website. While you host your website on an offshore server in, say Malaysia, the video and image feeds go directly from the fast file hosting server located in Europe, for example. In this way, you can have high speed downloads for your rich contents seemingly hosted offshore.

YoHOST.ORG has been offering this service to its clients for a long time. Their partnering Swiss based service www.directransfer.net allows webmasters to host all their rich contents on super fast, reliable servers in a Swiss datacenter while hosting their website pages on their Panamian or Malaysian servers offshore. This solution has turned out to be an optimal offshore hosting solution for rich media contents.

Any totally anonymous online payment options left?

The recent overhaul in the e-currency industry left few reliable alternatives for private payments on the Internet. E-gold based e-currencies were shut down one after another and many innocent merchants and their clients now have their funds stuck on e-gold and e-bullion accounts with little more to expect.

These developments make it important to look for robust options that will not disappear overnight. It is especially important for merchants’ reputation to offer such payment gateways to their clients most of whom create accounts in those payment systems after noticing their respective acceptence logos on the merchant’s websites.

Anonymous and offshore hosting industry has always been one of the ardent supporters and users of the private payment solutions. The reason is of course “privacy”. Few of us feel safe to feed our credit card details into the blinking screens. Besides, the e-currency based solutions usually have better “anti-phishing” protection than most credit card based alternatives.

So to ask a question in simple terms: Is there a totally anonymous payment option available today? The answer is “yes”. First, you get a WebMoney WMZ (USD denominated) prepaid card or Paymer Check (which are essentially the same thing) from one of the Internet dealers paying with PayPal or a credit card. Then, if the merchant you are trying to pay to accepts WebMoney (and the chance is that he or she accepts it in US dollars), at the check-out stage, you simply select “Paymer or prepaid WM-card” and enter your WM card’s details. It is this simple. And you can use the same card or Paymer check more than once as long as there is a positive balance on it.

The other option is Liberty Reserve. It is more cumbersome than a WebMoney prepaid card because you will need to actually register and fund an LR account. To create an account you will need to provide your personal details. And in order to fund your LR account you will need to find an exchange service that accepts PayPal, cards or bank wire transfers.

Once you get enough money on your LR account though, you can pay to the merchant using the “Private payment” option that will hide your LR account’s number from the merchant. As such, it is anonymous.

There are some resources for funding your Liberty Reserve accounts. I must warn you though that there is a lot of fraud going on with Liberty Reserve funding websites and you can easily fall a victim of fraudsters.

Look for WebMoney WMZ cards/Paymer Checks on Ebay.