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Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#11

Post by fragmede »

the reason they're doing this is because of credit card fraud. the attacker takes a stolen credit card, signs up for their service, and then runs up a huge bill. when the credit card owner discovers this, they do a chargeback, which means the hosting provider is out the money. do this enough times and the hosting provider gets kicked off their credit card processor and can't take payments anymore.

so yeah, it sucks, especially for privacy aficionados. there are places online that will take your untraceable Moreno (XMR) for hosting, but they end up getting used to anonymously host CSAM until the feds take that and hopefully the people creating that down as well.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#13

Post by pctTCRZ52y »

arealaccount wrote: post #4
pants2 wrote: post #2

AFAIK there's a new law requiring KYC for IaaS providers serving the US. I'm assuming it covers their butts as well regarding malicious activity, they don't want to host a DoS attack, CP site, or similar. You might be hard pressed to find a hosting provider in the US that doesn't ask for these things.

I’ve never seen this, maybe Im missing context? Amazon/Google/etc don’t require pictures of ID and CC?

agreed, I don't recall any large cloud or VPS provider asking for an ID.. maybe a French thing?

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#15

Post by lolinder »

fragmede wrote: post #11

the reason they're doing this is because of credit card fraud. the attacker takes a stolen credit card, signs up for their service, and then runs up a huge bill. when the credit card owner discovers this, they do a chargeback, which means the hosting provider is out the money. do this enough times and the hosting provider gets kicked off their credit card processor and can't take payments anymore. so yeah, it sucks,…

The issue OP has here isn't that they want anonymity, it's that the demands that this particular hosting provider is making are bizarre.

This is not the norm yet for hosting providers, and you don't have to pay with Monero to avoid having to send a photo of the credit card you used to pay for a service. Just pick almost any other hosting provider and they'll happily accept your credit card via an online checkout flow and be done with it until they get an abuse report.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#18

Post by theturtletalks »

codetrotter wrote: post #9
rsync wrote: post #5

KYC is already required at banks and they have the most complete - and global - view of all transaction flows . Therefore we should insist that KYC be solely performed by banks - no other firms should be required to perform it. Given the extraordinary privileges that banks enjoy, this would be a reasonable contribution to society - especially given that they are doing it anyway .

> we should insist that KYC be solely performed by banks That sounds like a great way of preventing anyone who doesn’t have a bank account from being able to use services at all. There are ~1.7 Billion people in the world that are unbanked. Even in the US alone there are around 55 million unbanked adults. (2018 numbers) I think we should push for the opposite. Less KYC all around.

KYC is actually a clever trick by the government to pass the buck to the banks to verify if transactions are illegal or not. The main reason is that when you are dealing with the government, you are innocent until proven guilty. Using the banks to money launder? It’s up to the government to prove it and bring charges or its business as usual for you.

With banks having that power, you’re guilty until you prove innocence. Haven’t committed any crimes? Doesn’t matter, you’re banned by default and after you provide ID, we’ll let you bank. Oh and if for any reason, we can ban you and you have no recourse. We won’t tell you the reason either. It’s a great way for the government to not actually go after the money launderers and give the keys of doing business to a select few.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#20

Post by natejlong »

pants2 wrote: post #2

AFAIK there's a new law requiring KYC for IaaS providers serving the US. I'm assuming it covers their butts as well regarding malicious activity, they don't want to host a DoS attack, CP site, or similar. You might be hard pressed to find a hosting provider in the US that doesn't ask for these things.

It's only a recent proposal in the US, not law, if you're talking about what I think you are:

https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-know-your-customer-proposal-wil...

>>> Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services...

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