On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 01:20:46PM +0300, Marcel Popescu wrote:
Second, has anyone seen http://www.wmtransfer.com/ ? Ok, it's Russian, so not a lot of trust in there... on the other hand, it DOES mean it's unlikely to bow to US pressure.
Any online payment service that has a convenient mechanism for Americans to add funds has at least one new potential market - cigarettes by mail from low-tax jurisdictions such as Indian reservations. The Feds recently bullied the credit card companies into not accepting payments for cigarettes (probably affects Paypal indirectly as well), so all of a sudden there's a market for something beyond the privacy services. Of course, the kinds of people who smoke cigarettes are not necessarily the kinds of people who are good at exploring privacy-protection services intelligently (:-), but a couple hundred bucks a month to avoid nicotine fits can be enough motivation for some people. If you can believe wmtransfer's statistics, they're probably getting a few thousands of dollars a day on their deposit/withdrawal fees, (if the transactions are denominated in rubles) or a few tens of thousands if they're in dollars/euros. That would imply that a cigarette company would probably be safe risking a couple of days' float using their payment system, because it's almost always worth more money to the payment company to stay in business than to rip off all of their accounts payable and fold. (Probably not worth risking a month's float, especially if the payment system were connected to the US Russian Mafia, who could coordinate ordering a large quantity of cigarettes for resale with absconding with the payments, but a couple of days should be safe enough.) It's certainly worthwhile for cigarette companies to deal with most of the more reputable online e-money companies. The one I'd actually be most worried about is e-gold - they're probably the biggest of them, and one of the most convenient, but the phishers aggressively go for their customers, and they don't do enough digital authentication for Joe Average Smoker to know if he's being phished. They could probably fix that, but of course any other company that made a significant dent in cigarette sales would also become a phishing target as well.