A way to make anonymous online donations

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-way-to-make-anonymous-online-donations.html

67 36 7 years ago

jpkoning.blogspot.com

smitty1e4• 7 years ago

We don't want wealthy people to have an outsized influence on politicians. And we want donations to be transparent so we can see how politicians might be influenced by certain donors.

As a pure thought experiment, let's just admit that the rich own our political process, and make it explicit:

- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

- All contributions have to go through the Treasury, and are public.

- If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.

Again, this is not a complete thought, but the intent is to drive politics away from the current poker match, toward chess.

jacobush• 7 years ago

That might be a stable state. Don't know how to get there though, also not sure if it would be better.

smitty1e4• 7 years ago

Overall, probably break-even.

gruez3• 7 years ago

- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

I heard of a variation of this where the multiplier is ln(x) or sqrt(x), so there's diminishing returns from additional donations. That way the rich don't have as much outsized impact on politics.

smitty1e4• 7 years ago

I'm OK with that.

wool_gather• 7 years ago

If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.

Not sure how this would be much of a penalty; how many rich folks who donate to politicians are themselves wanting to run for office?

Disenfranchisement for N years (where N could be "for life") would seem to make more sense. But it would probably have a side effect of pushing that person to find backchannels of influence.

juped• 7 years ago

Money in political campaigns is just a grift that enriches political fundraisers and does very little to move electoral needles. You may be confusing it with lobbying, which has very different economics.

gnode• 7 years ago

A problem I see with this is that government has control over the economy. A winning actor can tip the balance of wealth further in their favour.

Then again, this is just analogous to tyranny of the majority in conventional democracy. Elected governments can (and do) fortify their majority through voter disenfranchisement, or even genocide.

smitty1e4• 7 years ago

Are you saying they'd be more open about the graft?

zackmorris• 7 years ago

Also I wonder if additional transparency could work as an opposing force to moneyed interests. We could petition the government to create a realtime spreadsheet of all donations and lobbying so we could query it and see the entire money chain at any time. That way even gaps in the chain would be suspicious and fraud would be more easily revealed by crowdsourcing.

Taken to the limit, we could even get an immediate summary of what percentage of our retail purchases go to which political issues and buy according to our ethical values. It would be a way to put democracy back in the hands of the middle class since our combined buying power is larger than the wealthy class (I assume, I actually don't know if this is true anymore).

noprivacyforme• 7 years ago

In my country we have to activate prepaid debit cards by SMS, meaning that the prepaid cards are tied to our real life identity via our phone numbers.

Prepaid SIM cards need to be registered and tied to your SSN here, so a prepaid SIM would not work to get around this problem.

You might think I live in some authoritarian state or something but I actually live in Norway. In general life is good but I find these things disconcerting :(

I guess it might be doable to use one of those online services that will send and receive SMS on your behalf without registering any personal information. But I didn’t try that and for all I know it could be that SMS from such numbers would be rejected or flagged by the bank.

markvdb• 7 years ago

Getting a sim card using social engineering is easier and safer. You go into shopping street in front of a cell phone shop, explain you're a foreigner in distress.

"Sorry to disturb you, but could you please help? I just lost my phone. I urgently need to be reachable for {"my ill grandmother", "my biggest client"}. I have money on me, and I already bought a new phone, but I left my id at the hotel in $next_city, and the shop won't sell me a sim card without it. I'm desperate! Could you please help me out and get me a 20€ prepaid card?"

Give it 10 minutes tops and you'll have your sim...

breakingcups• 7 years ago

Or you can go to neighbouring countries and pick up 10 free sim cards at the local Lebara market.

Acrobatic_Road• 7 years ago

He had to give a postal code to register the card and presumably had his IP address logged. It should be easy enough to trace his real identity.

Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud. Also, the given address could be automatically checked against the geolocation of his IP address to make sure he's being honest. And it's not difficult to filter Tor/VPN IPs.

Another problem is that while he never gave personal information, he still created a pseudo-anonymous identity that can be profiled and potentially linked to his real identity based on a myriad of potential factors. Whereas if he used something like Monero (which he seems to be aware of), then there would be no such risk. There's really no point to this method anymore, and another commentator pointed out it wouldn't even work in certain countries.

rhacker• 7 years ago

Postal code can't isolate people. IP Address can be done at starbucks. Or for ++ security, using someone else's open wifi.

gruez3• 7 years ago

Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud.

How? I get how it might be the case if you're doing it to evade donation restrictions, but merely lying about your identity isn't fraud anymore than giving a fake phone number/zip code to the cashier when asked. AFAIK if you're not benefiting financially from the deception, it's not fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud#Elements

alasdair_2• 7 years ago

merely lying about your identity isn't fraud anymore than giving a fake phone number/zip code to the cashier when asked. AFAIK if you're not benefiting financially from the deception, it's not fraud.

This makes me wonder if giving a fake phone number to a cashier to obtain a financial discount (like a supermarket club card) is fraud...

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

may be criminal fraud

I can't say it isn't, but I also can't think of a specific reason that it is.

Payment processing uses address information for two main purposes: (1) determining sales tax jurisdiction/amount and (2) as an authentication factor (along with card number, CVV, and name).

In any normal purchase, giving a fake address could cause you to pay the wrong amount of taxes and/or taxes to the wrong people, which would be a legal issue. But this is a charitable donation, so that doesn't apply here.

The authentication thing is probably OK, too, since you are an authorized user of the card. You are giving wrong information, but not in order to gain access to something you're not supposed to have access to.

Maybe there's some other reason, though. Also, giving a fake address might violate some kind of agreement with the card company, although I kind of doubt they care if it doesn't cause them a practical problem.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

Yes, he says a fake address may have worked, but that may be criminal fraud.

This really hits home how different the US culture is from mine (Greek). Here's a crime that really shouldn't be a crime (being able to anonymously spend money), that has an extremely low rate of getting caught (who's going to find who you are if you use Tor or just go to Starbucks?) and is extremely unlikely to prosecute ("your honor, he used the wrong zip code on the card website!"), but people mention "this is a crime" as a deterrent. Over here people would think you were joking.

This cuts both ways, of course, and people commit more serious crimes (fraud, corruption, etc) more easily. It reinforces to me the adage that the best things about a country are also the worst things about that country.

thaumasiotes• 7 years ago

Here's a crime that really shouldn't be a crime [...] but people mention "this is a crime" as a deterrent.

Many, many people seem to be missing the mental concept of "a crime that shouldn't be a crime". You know it's wrong because it's against the law, and of course it's against the law because it's wrong.

throwaway2048• 7 years ago

lying isnt fraud by itself

ddtaylor• 7 years ago

To prevent MITM/downgrade attacks (such as by someone at the same coffee shop) you should always use an HTTPS link. Malicious parties can inject ads, trackers or botnet mining scripts otherwise. Here is a secure mirror:

https://archive.is/RTF2i

gruez3• 7 years ago

The way to nip donation fraud in the bud would be to require payment processors to avoid processing any prepaid debit card payment for political parties

If SaaS startups can block prepaid cards from being used for trials, there's no reason why this shouldn't be required for political campaigns.

herodotus• 7 years ago

Really old school, but why not stick plain old cash in an envelope? Make sure that the envelope contents are not visible (eg, wrap the bills in plain paper), and mail the envelope to the charity. Put a fake return address if you want. Explain in the enclosed note that the return address is made up. Or use the name of someone real - they will get a surprise tax receipt.

Yes there is a slight risk that someone in the delivery chain will open the envelope and steal the money, but I suspect the chances of this happening (at least here in Canada) are slim, especially if the envelope is inconspicuous.

Cash is still the ultimate way to make anonymous transactions.

new_guy• 7 years ago

Just don't lick the stamp, or they'll have your DNA to identify you with.

salawat• 7 years ago

That's what the squirrel is for.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

I don't know, I'm kind of partial to Monero myself.

bonyt• 7 years ago

Payment processors have a way to block prepaid cards, and I wouldn't be surprised if many organizations used these as a blunt instrument to prevent fraud. A political organization can probably even decide to treat those transactions as though they were anonymous cash donations.

Though, I'm thinking of the US, so this may be different in Canada or elsewhere.

See, e.g., https://support.stripe.com/questions/find-the-type-of-card-a...

The funding parameter of the card object exposes whether the card is a credit, debit, or prepaid card. A card may be unknown if Stripe was unable to determine its funding type.

418tpot• 7 years ago

if in public life I am a well-known conservative Evangelical, but I donate to a cause (say abortion education) that I privately support, I might prefer avoiding any chance that the donee leak my information in an attempt to 'out' me.

This sentence really stood out to me as an example of why politics has become so polarized.

If you have political ideals {A, B, C} and there are others who have ideals {A, B, !C}, and you allow your shared beliefs of {A, B} to either sway your opinion on C, or be not willing to communicate openly about it, then you are exacerbating the problem.

This forces people to try to try to identify with the group that they have the largest intersection with, and usually assume the ideals that that group has. Which means that a majority may silently be in support of C, but are so set in an us-vs-them mindset, that they allow !C to become part of their ideology.

alasdair_2• 7 years ago

Which means that a majority may silently be in support of C, but are so set in an us-vs-them mindset, that they allow !C to become part of their ideology.

This seems a natural byproduct of the type of voting system used. If every individual could vote secretly on every proposed bill, rather than having to vote for someone to publicly do our voting for us, we'd no longer need to have an us versus them system in politics.

Pigo• 7 years ago

I always thought people who just agreed with me on everything were boring, or afraid to admit otherwise. I'm no debate master, but I enjoy sparring with someone who knows more than I do, or has a view I hadn't considered.

Do schools even have debate anymore?

Akababa• 7 years ago

Do virtual credit cards like Google Pay do something similar to this?

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

Not really, as those are tied directly to you / an account. The article is a POC for how to give money and mitigate your identity.

philfreo• 7 years ago

In the US, another way to make anonymous donations to charity is to use a Donor Advised Fund [1]. For example Fidelity Charitable [2] makes it easy to make grants anonymously if you choose.

Beyond that, there can also be additional tax advantages to giving to giving via DAF, especially if you have appreciated stock, bitcoin, etc. [3]

1. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

2. http://fidelitycharitable.com/

3. https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/964970877338247169

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

To be fair to PayPal and the link, the receiving organizations have been selling your name and address to each other for a long time. Make a donation to say the Red Cross and in a couple of weeks you'll be getting (snail) mail from org you've never even contacted asking for money.

dead_mall• 7 years ago

Monero anyone?

A way to make anonymous online donations

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