Credit cards are the devil. The owner of the Kiwi Farms wrote a detailed article about payment networks and their control over basically all online businesses. Because of their monopoly on online payment it’s hard to buy anything online without a credit card. There’s other services like PayPal, but they ultimately always either use a credit card or a bank connection which almost always uses one of the select few payment networks under the hood.
There’s also crypto and for many privacy oriented services it has been possible for a while now to pay using that, but for everything else you’re shit out of luck. So the next best thing is to get an anonymous credit card, but that isn’t all that easy. There’s Privacy.com which let’s you create burner credit cards, but that only works in the U.S. I recently came across trocador.app which allows one to accept different coins and convert them all to XMR or BTC.
They also offer prepaid credit cards, which sounded like an interesting thing so I gave it a try. Here’s the basic summary of how it worked and what to keep in mind:
- There’s a list of restricted countries
- Cards are provided by three different companies: Tremendous, MyPrepaidCenter and VCdelivery
- My test card war from Tremendous, so other cards might work different
- The minimum card balance is 25$/€, maximum is 1000$, except for VCdelivery which has a limit of 10,000$, but only works in the U.S.
- The Cards do not support 3DS authentication, so that limits their usefulness quite a bit
- There’s a 2% + 2$ fee, so my test card of 25€ actually cost about 27.5€
- When you activate the card you’re asked for an email, name and address
- The email is required to log into the Tremendous dashboard, so use one that you have access to for a longer period of time
- Providing a fake address caused no issues in my case
- Usually the billing address provided at checkout can differ from the address provided for the card, but it’s still a good idea to remember the address used for the card
- I have not tried if the card works for stuff like age verification, but I’ll just assume it won’t
That’s basically it. I don’t plan on using credit cards any time soon again since I hate them with a burning passion, but if I really need to I at least now know where to get them.