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It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash. Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange
by waboremo 3y ago
It's very possible to run such without being exposed, but it involves patience and enough cash.
Most of the time, these services aren't done in direct exchange for money or from people who have a lot of money in the first place.
So what ends up happening is even if they can avoid the shallow legal issues by remaining private, they then run into the problem that nobody can pay for the service (not many options for providing that transaction privately). You might think "just run ads" but the problem there is multifaceted, most are likely going to be using adblockers, on top of that to remain private they'll be locked out of most paying ads and only get the most spammy garbage incentivizing more to use adblocker to visit the site.
- joshspankit 3y agoAlso: ad companies and payment processors are a weak link. They can provide de-anonymizing information to officials and cut off payments when their corporate values shift.
- theturtletalks 3y agoI always wondered this. Many piracy sites have Adsense or some sort of ads. Can't Google just fingerprint which Adsense account is being used and find the person getting paid?
- hattmall 3y agoThere's an entire industry of buying established accounts set up with an unsuspecting person's identity. Idk about Adsense specifically, but you can get Amazon selling and the linked bank account with docs for like $1000.
- elorant 3y agoAnd how do you get paid? AdSense requires a bank account registered to the same name.
- CryptoBanker 3y agoYou buy the accompanying bank account
- madars 3y agoYes. For example, Z-Library accepted Amazon gift card donations using an email linked to their identities: https://torrentfreak.com/how-google-and-amazon-helped-the-fbi-identify-z-librarys-operators-221117/ https://torrentfreak.com/how-google-and-amazon-helped-the-fb...
- alwayslikethis 3y agoThis screams poor opsec to me. Accepting anything other than anonymized crypto (Monero, etc) is basically untenable in this era of mass surveillance. Going through a big tech company is a good way to get caught.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoif you're the host. the end user can use gift cards just fine, and they're usually pretty fungible. am 100% okay moving the risk to the operation/operator
- heresie-dabord 3y ago> ad companies and payment processors [...] cut off payments when their corporate values shift. "Sir, is it time for us to claim to have corporate values?" "Not yet, m'boy, we are still swimming in our private ocean of profits!"
- anjel 3y agoAFOAF belongs to the same pvt tracker now for more than a dozen years. The admins amp and push the community feels and have periodic fund raisers. No ads, and if you want to donate, you buy a jpg of a flower on an different site. Seems to work out well for all concerned and while you have to maintain an u/d ratio, free leach and easy generous ratio reqts contribute to that community feeling.