How to make Anonymous Purchases Online
How to make Anonymous Purchases Online
Anonymous purchases are one more step in enhancing your privacy. Making an anonymous purchase can shield your identity, credit card, and give companies very little data about you. Anonymous purchases can withold your identity, and prevent large amounts of fraud. Purchasing items anonymously isn’t only used for criminals and illegal items as perceived by the public. Anonymous purchases are made to shield your identity, and keep your data to you. In this day an age with the N.S.A. and many other data harvesting giants, the least amount of data you give out, the better.
Why do I want to purchase items anonymously?
When purchasing items online, physical or digital, you give out a lot of data. Names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, gender, emails, and many other pieces of sensitive information. When you input it into the website, it just disappears and says “Congratulations”, or “Order Received”. You don’t actually see where your data goes. What if the website isn’t trusted, what will they do with that data? If the website isn’t trusted, can they steal your card data? Or even if the website is trusted, will they sell that information to a third party? Is the data you just entered into that website online kept to them? Many valid questions may circulate when purchasing items online. With so many scams and fraudsters on the internet, how can you decide if a website is trusted or not?
Why you do want anonymity when purchasing
You may want to shield your credit card data from hackers or unknown websites. You may not feel safe inputting your sensitive information into the website. You may not want an item to show up on a bill of yours. You may want to shield your identity from the internet. or you simply may just want some privacy, or anonymity!
3 ways to purchase physical goods anonymously
1. Mask Me – Mask Me is a FREE disposable credit card service from the privacy company, Abine. You attach a credit card to their free disposable credit cards and it allows you to make %100 legal purchases online with a masked card. With a masked card you can save your identity, and credit card information. Also, the cards can NEVER be charged without your consent. You choose how much you want to add to a card, and that much will be on the card (you can refill cards or get new ones each time). You can choose to obtain a new card whenever needed. Also, on your credit card statement ALL charges will show up as ABINE,INC. You don’t use any of your real data (you can mask your address and use all of ABINE,INC’s info), and it masks your credit card provider from seeing what you do!
2. PrePaid Cards – Prepaid cards that you can get at the market, or any big box retailer work great too. Pay with cash, and you have a completely anonymous and disposable credit card. Prepaid cards are great for anonymity. They are just one time cards not hooked to you in any way. Prepaid cards bought with cash are almost an untraceable credit card.
3. Use a third party vendor to make the purchase for you – A new wave of websites are hitting the internet. Basically an escrow, where you can pay bitcoin, cash, or credit, and someone else will make the purchase for you with their information. Escrow services are great for anonymity. If you pay with an anonymous currency you are completely unknown to the website, aside from your shipping address (which the escrow would have to put in, or how else would you receive your physical goods). Just be sure to choose a reliable escrow service that respects your privacy.
3 ways to purchase digital goods anonymously
There are numerous ways to purchase digital goods anonymously, I will just go over the easiest and most secure ways below.
1. BitCoins – The cryptocurrency known as bitcoin is one of the most anonymous forms of payment. Its virtually %100 anonymous. Bitcoins have been one of the longest lasting forms of anonymous payments online. A lot of companies are starting to accept BitCoin more and more. Get free bitcoins, and start making anonymous purchases online. Or any alter cryptocurreny should work.
2.Gift Cards – Gift cards can be %100 anonymous if bought with cash. A lot of websites accept Amazon as a form of payment, so an Amazon giftcard can be an anonymous checkout gateway. Gift cards can be used for an anonymity tool, and they can also be very useful. Some websites will even let you buy digital subscriptions with gift cards to big box retailers. Be sure to check which gift cards are accepted before checking out.
3.Prepaid cards – Prepaid cards can make many purchases online as they are just as valid as a credit card. Prepaid cards bought with cash are also virtually anonymous online. They are a credit card with no strings attached.
More about anonymous purchases online
Anonymous purchases online are completely safe. A lot of people see anonymous purchases as unrealistic, or only for criminal activity, but they can be used for everyday use. Anonymous purchases can save your identity, stop fraud, keep your data private, and prevent unwanted things from happening to you. If everyone would have used a Masked Me credit card at Target, everyone could have stayed safe at the Target breach (assuming transactions were online).
Overall
Anonymous transactions are important. Whether you are just shopping at a large widely known website, or a smaller fishy website, privacy matters. Big corporations are not immune from hackers, and the same goes for smaller companies. Privacy is one thing you deserve online, keep it that way.
I can say there’s the way to pay even more anonymously. I’ve recently (about a half a year ago) learned about BCN – cryptocurrency based on CryptoNote technology. The technology provides you with untraceable payments and unlinkable transactions. CN uses very difficult cryptography and seems to be developed by very smart people. If you have BCN and BTC wallets you can pay completely anonymously changing your money on exchanges when you need. It takes some time but at the end of the day you have the right result. Links: https://cryptonote.exchange.to/market/bcn/btc
https://cryptonote.org/
https://bytecoin.org/
Thanks for the recommendations. CryptoNote does look interesting, but it begin ByteCoin, it just seems like another cryptocurrency. I don’t really understand how its any different than BitCoin. I do see you can exchange and pay with BCN instead, but I see BitCoin as bigger and better than this. There are far to many altcoins that really cloud the cryptocoin market. I still think BTC will outperform and outlast, as it was one if not the original cryptocurrency. Great recommendations, but altcoins are rarely successful.
Just to say that Cryptonote has now closed.
I understand your position but still want to pinpoint this fact: Bytecoin (BCN) is not a BTC fork. I’m personally impressed by the level of math and cryptography of this technology. It’s truly innovation and works stable. BCN promises to be like BTC at least. It’s not just another altcoin. You cannot just insert ring signatures and one-time transaction key into another cryptocoin. I believe in Bytecoin (BCN) and most of all I appreciate the opportunity to introduce more privacy into my life. And if Bytecoin can provide it, I’ll take it with no questions.
I understand what your saying, but I think there are to many altcoins on the market. I do understand it offers privacy, and a better form than some others. As I said earlier, I think BitCoin will continue to be the largest CryptoCoin success. Almost anyone can build an cryptocurrency today. Nothing similar to the security and privacy of BCN, but BitCoin is the largest and will prevail. I think the cryptocurrency market is just getting to big, and there are so many that only a subset will actually survive or even be realistic. We will have to wait and see how BCN pans out. I do appreciate you noting it, and think its a very cool concept, but people are just starting to recognize BTC, I don’t think other altcoins are really going to make a big hit online. I chose to note only the most realistic and most used payment methods on this list. There are many different methods to make anonymous payments, but I don’t note them as they are not widely used, or really practical.
Does anyone know WHICH prepaid debit or credit card DOESN’t require you to enter your social security number and a bunch of other info for it to work?
I bought greendot debit visa with cash and to my great dismay, learned I can’t begin using the card unless I fill in a bunch of private info online…please help thanks very much
Many times they have prepaid Visa cards many people use for gifts. They can be found in a lot of big box retailers or just around the supermarket. You can buy almost anything with them. Too add, you can even go online and just fill in your name and address on the card if wanted.
Not all purchases online work with the card, so sometimes the data must be filled out. Generally stuff under $50 doesn’t have an issue with the card.
Lemme know if you have any other questions.
i want to know how i can purchases lot of items with 50$ gift card
You can purchase gift cards that have a visa or mastercard logo on them and work the same way. But these you load with cash, can only be loades once and and are then discarded. They are anonymous and you do not have to give your personal info. If they ask just give bogus info.
Hope this helps
You mention 3rd party vendors that will purchase items on your behalf. Can you list a few of these or point to a source that lists these?
The only reason we did not list any, is we do not know who is reliable and who is not. There are a number of companies that do it if you look with a simple Google search. But we chose not to recommend any as we are unsure of their credibility or stability of the service. We would never want to recommend a product we have not tested or know anything about.
Great article great post and great last comment. I’d like to personally thank you you’re doing a great job. Sincerely.
Hi Enzo, thank you for the kind words! :)
Masked Me’s credit card anonymising service isn’t free. It only comes with with their premium service.
Hi Falesia, yes that is true. It is apart of their newer Blur service which combines all their privacy tools.
The problem with prepaid gift cards, is that even if you purchase them with cash, they are still activated in store, and therefore LE can find out which store it was purchased at, and at which time, and check the security footage. While they won’t know your name, they will have your likeness on camera.
RED you could ask someone else to buy it for you..
mask me doesn’t work for purchasing goods from websites based outside the US :( (yet at least, they are working on allowing approved countries)
Prepaid cards dont allow purchases outside the us (I believe this also applies to websites based outside the us)
American express Serve seems like it might work but so many customer complaints and not all websites are set up to take gift cards.
Most places dont accept bitcoin.
What to do? Dont want address being shared over interwebz for junk mail and such.
Visa gift cards are only valid when used for purchases within the the USA.
Thanks for everything this really work ed so happy thank you 😊😊😊😊
This article could really use an update. Pretty sure most if not all of these are fairly much useless now. You can’t buy bitcoins anonymously. In the year 2017 I’m having a pretty hard time finding any useful way to make truly anonymous purchases.. and that’s pretty much the way ‘they’ want it. Yes, you know who ‘they’ are.
Where are those ‘escrow’ websites now?
is there any way to recive my goods without using my adress ???
There’s no point in anonymous payment if you can’t get anonymous shipment.
Several legal gun part mfgrs have been raided for reasons only known to the BATF and the shipping addresses are now in a Federal database. So that anonymous 80% lower? Not so much.
This article needs an update that includes anonymous shipment.
Bitcoin is even less anonymous than a credit card. What are you talking about? Monero is the ONLY anonymous crypto.
Why isn’t there way to sign in and pay for electronic things that works across everything? Am I missing something? Google/Apple Pay are close, but mean giving everything to them.
I would love to see an app that protected my privacy, allowed me to pay for things at restaurants, online, in online stores without having to register for so many websites. It is especially annoying on my phone to have to fill in the new account registration forms over and over again when you visit a new city/ place. One account to rule them all? That isn’t some big social media giant.
Am I kidding myself, or do other people have this frustration? Is there an answer?