Electronic Currency

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E-currency

E-currency is a generic title to services that allow money transfer to happen online. Usually, the E-currencies you are going to want to focus on are backed with gold, and based off shore. Although PayPal could technically be considered an E-currency, you are going to want to avoid them. You want E-currency that does not verify the information you provide them, or at least only verifies a small amount of peoples information randomly. These services are generally based in South America, and are often referred to as Digital Gold Currencies, or DGCs.

Many people think that using DGC is very hard. This could not be further from the truth. A little bit of work is required to get the hang of DGCs, and it is true that using them is quite expensive, but you are unlikely to ever find a more secure or anonymous way to handle payments. The first thing to know about DGCs is that the parent company does not usually sell small amounts of value. Here is how the distribution of E-currency works:

There is a main company, and they have a vault with a certain amount of gold in it. For every gram of gold in their vault, they make an equivalent amount of "digital gold", which is usually just a cryptographically secure number inside of an account. To make sure that they are not making money out of thin air, DGCs usually have multiple independent verifiers confirm that they have the gold in the vault. The main company usually will not sell less than around $10,000 worth of digital gold, and will usually not trade you physical gold for less than around $10,000 worth either. Enter top level exchangers.

Top level exchangers are companies that buy bulk digital gold from the main DGC companies. An exchanger will buy perhaps $10,000 worth of digital gold, and will then off it for sale in smaller amounts. How you buy the digital gold from them is up to their own procedures, usually they will take money wires, bank wires, etc. In addition to paying for the digital gold you want, you cover the fee of transferring the money to buy it to the exchanger, plus usually around a 5% total fee. For example, let's say you want to buy $500 worth of digital gold. You wire the $500 to the exchanger, which will cost you around $40 or so. You also pay 5% of $500 for the exchanger fee, or $25. So to buy $500 of digital gold, you would need to pay around $565.

Before you can buy digital gold, you need to set up a digital gold account with the main company. They run the servers that keep track of who has how much digital gold. Some DGC companies wont ask you for any personal information. Many of the ones that do ask you for information don't verify it, and of those who do verify information they usually only verify a random amount of people and many slip through the cracks. It is usually free to register a digital gold account. You should use Tor or another proxy to keep your location secret, and use random information from the white pages and pretend it is your own. Make sure to store all the account information encrypted on your computer, sometimes you may need to remember the name or address you used to sign up for the account with. But there is a very low chance you will be required to ever verify your identity in any way. After you set up your DGC account, you will be given a unique numbered account that only you know the password for. DGCs tend to have top notch security.

So after you have your digital gold account set up, you send an exchanger money to load it with digital gold. As I said before, this can be sort of spendy, but it isn't all that bad. In addition to sending them the money, you also send them your account number, and sooner or later they will fund your account with digital gold. Keep in mind that exchangers have no affiliation with the main DGC company, and sometimes they are scammers. Do research before you send an exchanger money.

Once you have loaded digital gold currency to your account, you can transfer it to other accounts. It usually costs a very small amount of money to transfer funds from one account to another, usually in the order of a dollar per transfer. Many digital gold currencies allow for you to make private payments, so that minimal logging of who you are sending money to or receiving money from takes place. Private payments generally cost a dollar or two extra.

Once you have your initial account loaded, you are going to want to distance the money from yourself. So, set up one or two other E-currency accounts and use different random white page information for both of them. I suggest you pretend to be in two different countries for the two extra accounts you set up. Make sure to use a different Tor exit node for each of the two accounts you set up, you can be especially clever and use an exit node from the country you are pretending to be from. If DGCs ever start blocking Tor (they might), you can just buy offshore VPS which can be rented for as little as $20 a month, and connect to them via Tor, and chain them to the end of your Tor circuit (but so far this isn't required).

After your two extra accounts are set up, transfer the money from the account the exchanger funded to the second account you set up. Then, from the second account you set up, transfer the money to the third account you set up. Although it is probably possible for LE to follow the money if they try (although a lot of this depends on the country of the main DGC, and their financial privacy laws), they are going to have an extremely difficult time in court to prove that the person who owned the first DGC account also owns the last one. This allows for anonymous payments for people in countries where you absolutely need an ID to send money wires, and where it is difficult or impossible to get fake IDs. Even if the exchanger can see that your real identity funded the first DGC account, they can't see the end account the money ended up in. And even if LE follows the entire process, they are going to have a hell of a time trying to prove that you own the first and last account in your DGC account string.

Once you have moved the money to your final DGC account, there are a number of things you can do with it. First of all, you can send money wires with it. Simply find the details of the person requesting a wire, and then sell the E-currency to a lower level exchanger in return for a money wire. Provide them with the details of the person you are intending to pay with a money wire.

Low level exchangers are people who buy digital gold currency in smaller amounts from individuals, rather than in bulk from the main DGC companies. You can expect to pay them around 5% of the money you send them, plus the cost of them sending cash. Low level exchangers will send you money via many different routes, the most popular being wires. Some will even send you cash in the mail, but these exchangers tend to be more underground. Some exchangers offer ATM cards that you can fund with E-currency and cash out at an ATM. There used to be anonymous ATM cards where no ID was required, but they all got shut down or went deep underground. Now to get an ATM card you are going to need to commit identity theft, and have access to forged documentation to set up mail boxes to get the cards mailed to you at.

Your ID ---> Money Wire ----> Top Level Exchanger ----> DGC Account One ---> DGC Account Two ---> DGC Account Three -----> Low Level Exchanger ---> Money Wire ----> Money Recipient

It will cost you approximately $600 at the start of the above line to get $500 to the end of the line. However, you will be extremely anonymous, even if you are required to show a legitimate ID for the initial step of the process (although you will be more anonymous if you use a forged ID at that step).

You can also send the digital gold to people who accept digital gold for payment.

Your ID ---> Money Wire ----> Top Level Exchanger ----> DGC Account One ---> DGC Account Two ---> DGC Account Three -----> Recipients DGC account

People who take digital gold for payment generally will want to repeat the same steps as for sending money, but in reverse. For example, they will want to also have two or three DGC accounts set up, and send the money down them to cut ties between the account customers send money to and the account they cash out with. People who take digital gold currency for payment have a number of options for cashing out. They can sell the digital gold currency to a low level exchanger in return for a wire (which they would preferably pick up with a fake ID or question and answer). They can also get an ATM card with a stolen identity, although they will need a safe place to get the ATM card mailed to. One option is to have the ATM card mailed to the box of someone you know online who lives in a country where it is easy to get a mail box with a fake ID. Then, they can take a skim of the magnetic strip on the back of the ATM card and E-mail you an encrypted copy of the skim dump. You then decrypt the dump, and use a magnetic strip encoder to write it to blank card stock. This method will allow for people in countries with hard to forge IDs get anonymous ATM cards, although they will still need to find a stolen identity and possibly photoshop scans of IDs. As long as it is easy to set up fake ID boxes in one country on this earth, it will be possible for stolen identity ATM cards to be distributed around the world anonymously.

your ID ---> Money Wire ----> Top Level Exchanger ----> DGC Account One ---> DGC Account Two ---> DGC Account Three -----> Recipients DGC account one ----> DGC Two ---> DGC Three ----> Low Level Exchanger ----> Money Wire ----> Fake ID

It would cost the person sending money around $575 to send $500 down the above line. It would cost the person receiving money around $50 to get the $500 to them in cash.

There are numerous ways you can make it even more difficult to trace E-currency. Such techniques generally involve long strings of transfers, with multiple multiple wires from multiple exchangers around the world involved. Another trick is to run money through digital currency casinos, which are usually only a dollar or two to cash into, and only a dollar or two to cash out of. The main goal is to get as many accounts and especially jurisdictions between you and the recipient of the money as possible. There is really no limit to the amount of complexity you can work into a DGC system, the only problem is it gets expensive pretty fast. In general, a single DGC account and a single exchanger is all that is needed if you can cash into the account anonymously. If you must use your real ID to cash in, you should use multiple accounts (and really might as well anyways, it costs only a dollar to send money from one account to another).

Another trick is to find friends in countries where other payment can be taken and send them funds a certain way in exchange for them loading the digital currency for you (since people in some countries can still send money wires anonymously).