WebMoney

[Bill Stewart]

>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.