Modern day crooks
It's the 21st century, banks have been around for long enough. It's amazing though how they still help criminals escape justice even in this modern day.
You all are aware of how banks work right? You enter your details, social security number, address, etc.
These all work perfectly in order to ensure no one can perform malicious transactions without being traced in the event of a fraud of criminal activity.
Well yeah that was pretty true for a long time. However nowadays there is a problem with the payment processors such as Paypal.
Paypal in itself is a red flag, as you can make an account as a totally anonymous person, store up to 2500 USD and send it forward just with a click of a button. Paypal has no way of knowing who you are as long as you didn't directly connect to it from your own computer. Lots of countries have internet cafes which don't even have security cameras.
This is bad because crooks can trick people into sending them money, use one of the less known cryptocurrency services and automatically extract their money while remaining completely anonymous.
One such activity is pretending to be a lawyer of somebody's son while they're unable to answer their phone and say their relative is in a hospital and requires money or they need money to get out of prison this is done especially to people who's son is gone out of the country.
Caring families are usually pushed into panicking and sending the money to the said account, and since nowadays paypal is the most used payment processor they can even use that to be completely anonymous.
Cryptocurrencies are also an ideal method to operate malicious activities as they are not easily traced by financial anti-fraud agencies. There are no credentials stored by them therefor they are anonymous and also raise a red flag.
Of course progress is being made to make them not as anonymous however this is also easily avoided by using the worst enemy of such agencies.
VPNs which stand for Virtual Private Networks which allow you to safely hide your home IP
In fact nowadays everytime such crook is detected anti-fraud agencies are already accustomed to asking vpns for the IP of the crook, except some of these agencies do indeed not disclose any information about their client because they literally don't store any of it. The one exception is the money transaction they make.
That's the one way they have to catch these criminals.
The worst thing of them all in this combination is prepaid maestro debit cards.
These cards allow criminals to also mark their paypal account as verified by connecting them to paypal, so they are believed to be registered people which automatically allows them to make malicious online stores for hitmen, drugs, sex slaves and other such stuff.
This is all usually done in the "Deep Web" so no innocent bystanders cross these online malicious shops.
As if this isn't enough, criminals nowadays use offshore bank accounts. Some of these banks accept faxed information which requires just a little image manipulation to change data on it and hide the face of the individual who sent it.
Now, using these in combination today allows criminals to safely do their dark deeds without fearing punishment from the law. The worst part is that if they combine all these services together, they can do all their malicious activities from their own home sitting on a chair and cashing in money.
While all of these systems are allowed to work together, criminal activities can flourish without any setbacks, the fact that they are allowed to work together allows criminals to flourish, and this is why modern security is a joke.
All photos are public domain!