5 ms·
There is no need to wear Frankengloves you can just coat your finger tips with transparent, second skin brand type liquid adhesive bandages so you get the same
by pakled_engineer 12y ago
There is no need to wear Frankengloves you can just coat your finger tips with transparent, second skin brand type liquid adhesive bandages so you get the same protection without having creepy looking rubber hands when trying to defraud a coffee shop with monopoly money.
I also liked the US attorney quote "the internet is a dangerous place because it's an open forum.."
- mikeyouse 12y agoActual, much less objectionable quote; The Internet is a dangerous place for law-abiding citizens, but because it’s open it’s a forum where criminals can get at people and steal their identities or pass counterfeit currency. The internet has clearly made ID theft and wide distribution of counterfeit money easier..
- pakled_engineer 12y agoIdentity is usually stolen out of garbage cans and mail boxes, or by cronies working at banks and restaurants at least the kind of ID theft where taking out loans and other financial fraud that isn't just ripped database dumps of credit cards. They recently busted a network here that would pay drug addicts to break into mail boxes then use stolen property assessments for loans and false tax returns. The attorney is correct that the internet just makes it easier for anybody to become criminal with easier access to tools like counterfeit currency when before they had to know somebody in the underground, but even then it wasn't all that difficult. I remember in the mid 1990s my highschool pot dealer used to also sell bricks of counterfeit $10 bills. Before that a kid in my elementary school had an older brother who would mint tokens and he would sell them to us at school to use at arcades and vending machines when the dollar coin was released in 1987. I don't think the internet has really changed anything these kinds of criminal networks always existed.
- JohnTHaller 12y agoIdentity is often stolen from vulnerable systems as well. Like that huge Target data breach. Those stolen card details end up for sale on carder websites for around a $1 each.
- Spooky23 12y agoNot really. In the old days, the only verification were things like city directories that listed the names and occupations of people. Fraud or multiple/stolen identities were pretty trivial. Running facial recognition on DMV databases has turned up all sorts of people with multiple identities for various reasons.
- WhitneyLand 12y agoI assume the hands have a set of human fingerprints built in, and the gloves are used when to you need to use a fingerprint scanner and hide your identity. So the liquid adhesive wouldn't have worked, but I'm not sure why he couldn't make a set of fake prints using a small rubber mold that would only cover fingertips.
- MichaelGG 12y agoWells Fargo gave me a fake $100, during my anonymous bitcoin experiment (I tried to buy btc truly anonymously to see how feasible this is). I didn't realize at the time, and processed to spend the bills to get change (a bank can easily record the serials on all cash withdrawals, thus linking my btc purchase). During this whole time, I used several sets of disposable gloves. When I tried the fake $100, which I didn't know was fake, it looked highly suspicious - buying a $2 tea with gloves and a $100 bill. Fortunately the shopkeep was cool about it. Wells Fargo wasn't. They refused to investigate or refund, and suggested I was lying about the bill and had inserted it. I'd guess the downside to using just fingertip covers is that while you hide prints, you increase the possibility of leaving DNA via skin cells. Probably not an issue when spending cash, but more of an issue when preparing a package. (Though you need more than just simple gloves; I used a jacket and made sure my forearm was covered, as well as not using any surfaces I previously used). (Result of my experiment: it's extremely difficult to get Bitcoins anonymously. Opsec is very tough, and LE must be thrilled about stuff moving online and into BTC since it's so easy to get wrong.)
- unabridged 12y ago>it's extremely difficult to get Bitcoins anonymously buy a miner, connect through tor.
- MichaelGG 12y agoI suppose that's possible, but last I looked into it, it was also expensive. If I need $5000 in BTC, how much do I have to spend and how long do I have to wait? Additionally, how many bits of identity do you lose by buying a capable miner? I'm not sure mining qualifies as "easy", though perhaps not extremely difficult.
- unabridged 12y agoFor $5000 you can definitely afford a miner. I'm a couple years out of the loop on mining technology and the current & future global hashrate, but with research you could probably get a pretty good estimate on the break even point. An uneducated guess is about a year. Take a look at Dash (formerly known as darkcoin). It has anonymous mixing built into the protocol. So buying BTC -> dash -> BTC should be able to create anonymous coins. The bits of identity you lose (with this method or buying a miner) only identify you as possible BTC holder, but the actual coins are still untraceable/anonymous.