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Anonymity (14)

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Hi,

A lot of people on here seem to be running anonymously.

I live in the UK. Has anyone any advice on how can I run through a Ltd liability company and keep my name and address private?

There are elements to the sites I'd be running that would leave us open to theft. (Crypto - the world where piracy and hacking and even violent extortion is totally common place.) I want to stay as low profile on this as I can.

How does everyone else do it?

Best thought so far is to use Whoisguard, a Romanian company setup, and Stripe as a merchant account, but that seems super complicated and has many warnings about not really granting anonymity, and being a red flag to HMRC.

All you guys constantly cycling FB accounts and so on - what do you do?

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Who you’re hiding from plays a big part in the approach thats needed

- Lawyers sending C&D threats on behalf of celebrities
- Affiliates tracing your fingerprints to rip angles
- Offers finding you landers to dispute payment due to “compliance”
- newspapers and magazines furious about your templates
- Disgruntled customers seeking to take you down.
- Weird people on YouTube exposing your tricks


At the bare minimum, every affiliate would benefit from...

- A domain through a truly offshore service like njal.la, with private whois + fake account details

- Hosting paid with bitcoin or cash purchased gift cards. Namecheap is an easy option.

- Tracking service paid with gift cards

- No log VPN service (VyprVPN etc) on when using anything above

- sensible browser security, Firefox with webRTC disabled, ublock and privacy badger

- secure passwords using a manager like 1password

- don’t have a flashy social media presence and no bragging

To take it further... (btw these are all super legit and the minimum steps I see most big nutra/crypto affiliate groups take)

- don’t use any services with USA data centres, for example slack, gmail, Skype

- private encrypted email hosted on your own server (check out mail-in-a-box)

- Nevis based company incorporation

- Nominee director who has their name in all affiliate accounts

- Multiple bank accounts outside the USA. Cook Islands trust for personal cash.

- Logs disabled on all hosting

- encrypted chat (not telegram! !!), signal is nice

- Multiple lawyers on retainer across time zones so someone is able to intervene and advise on issues quickly.

- warrant canary visible to all key partners

- whole new persona for yourself, fake name and copies of ID. Unique usernames and email for every service you might register for (e.g. Skype)

- computer encrypted, any file sharing services encrypted and 0 knowledge

- renounce citizenship... lol

I think very few affiliates understand the risk involved or just how devastating even a small lawsuit can be. Just the time involved is extensive, let alone the cost of maintaining offshore structures.

Most of it comes down to not being “the lowest hanging fruit”. If you’ve got domain privacy on and hosted outside the USA, it’s a enormous amount of work to chase you down - impossible even without court assistance.

At the end of the day you are scamming people - in many cases poor, defenceless and uneducated individuals who are desperate to turn their lives around. You need to really understand and become comfortable with that negative karma first, before turning on your VPN...

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LOL, privacy level: “ISIS affiliate”


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Holy... what biz u do?

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What an amazing list. Thankyou.

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Is it difficult to get banking for your Nevis company and do you pay yourself from the Nevis company or via another one.

I am still looking for a low tax setup with flexibility, low running costs and as much anonymity as possible.
Aa

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OMG nickpeplow are you really using all that you listed? You're better than most secret agents )

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Most are in place, but I don’t run anything remotely uncompliant - it’s just good business sense.

There are a lot of weird people out there online and I’d rather not encounter any in real life.

It’s not possible to review every campaign and creative the team put together, so it’s nice to know you have a chance to make things good before any action could happen.

I see affiliates running ecom with baby products... heaven knows what would happen if the worst occurred and a kid got hurt. But seems they don’t care about liability :/





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I was always wondering about the liability an affiliate would carry in cases like you mentioned. I'm not talking about ecommerce affiliates who actually pose as the seller of the product, but rather a standard affiliate who just does the promo part and send the traffic to the final seller. I guess since such affiliate isnt a direct seller, they shouldn't carry any liability for possible damages caused by the product... or am I wrong?

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I think it’s fair to say an affiliate can’t test all products or services they promote, so they are in a way not responsable for any damage caused by a product they don’t sell themselves.

But let’s be honest, we are all smart people in a certain way. And we definintely have a sense of what’s quality/high-end/legal/honest and what’s cheap chinese/illegal/misleading.... somewhere there is a balance, depending on the person where that balance is....


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Sure, in many cases we can definitely tell a quality product from a shitty one. But issues arise in the "standard" business world too ... car manufacturers recall cars regularly, to fix some stuff and as far as I know, the manufacturer pays the fix, not the seller. Supermarkets are pulling goods all the time, and I'm pretty sure its the producer who has to cover the loss. I've heard about numerous law suits, but it was always against the producer of the goods, not the seller. Or the gigantic lawsuits against the tobacco companies, they had to pay for damages, not the countless tobacco shops selling their products.

I might be wrong, but I'd say it's pretty much always the producer who's responsible for possible damages that result from the use of the produce.

Misleading advertising would be another thing, I guess we carry some responsibility in such cases, especially when using brand logos etc ...

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LMAO

a-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la durka durka

Fellow STM members, that's list is about some the worst advice I've read in years. IMHO, stay the fuck away from selling anything that requires that level of hiding. Those are deep soviet state ransomware tactics that only someone, knowing they'll go to PYITA prison if discovered, needs to use. Maybe a torrent or upload site... There are countless other products or services industries that can scale to 8 and 9 digit companies without all that hassle. How would you scale a business having to manage all that?!

In the UK, all you need is a shell holding company with a nominee and virtual office address. They're relatively cheap and easy to find all over the place. Isle of Man, Malta or Cyprus (can be sketch) have also successfully been used...

On the subject of Stripe, they don't keep anything anonymous. They are a fully registered Maltese Financial Institution requiring to keep all Anti Money Laundering (AML) information on each person that's signed up for an account. Plus they are required to produce any transactional information that the card schemes would request, whether legally subpoenaed by a court or not. This point does bring up the fact though that Stripe is not a very good solution to scale an advertisers business on. As stripe does not offer transparency nor open dialog before issues arise with regard to their risk tolerances and policies.

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Nickpeplow is not wrong on any points. That advice is basic flag theory applied to online marketing, although it is overkill for a solo affiliate doing <$10k/day revenue. Focus on scaling your business before solidifying your infrastructure. Most civil aggressors he mentioned will have few means of recourse if you are located outside the US or EEA, as a non-US + non-EU citizen. Plus Nevis or BVI incorporation with SG or AE banking, again good practical steps for a business "in their own right", not to "hide" an entity or funds. "HIDING" is impossible in 2019 with AEOI agreements signed by almost every developed country on the planet. Nevis and BVI are good jurisdictions to incorporate because of their business-friendly and privacy laws. SG and UAE are good jurisdictions to bank as they both have stable well capitalized banks that will survive the next crisis. Neither are places to hide illicit funds or illicit flow of funds.

I will add to avoid using any US based TLDs (.COM, .NET, etc any domain TLDs in the Verisign registry), or anything that would allow the US to claim jurisdiction over your business activities (merchant processing based in the US, customer service in the US, fulfillment in the US, receiving payments from US entity affiliate networks etc)

All this said. Almost all affiliates operate in a grey area where civil disputes may arise. It is entirely legal to take precautions to lower your civil legal risk.

IF you are into criminal misdeeds however, you and your money can be found in any corner of the world, and you will be prosecuted and penalized for those misdeeds. I happily do not think that applies to anyone in this community.

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Damn nice list there Nick! You've always been ahead of that curve buddy haha!

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