How to receive anonymous payments?

[BobbyBrandt]

Erotic literature.

How exactly would you envision a transaction occurring with gift cards as payment? It seems like there would need to be a lot of trust on part of both parties.

 

[lovecraft68]

PayPal is also known for not wanting SOB on their service.

Story for you from the erotica no good history book.

Way the hell back in I want to say 2012 or 2013, PP played this game of saying they would kick any site that sold erotica off their service. They claimed this was because of Visa who they received a letter from saying they would be no longer be allowing their CC service to pay for erotic content. People panicked, Smashwords sent out a letter with a date all your smut had to be removed by and a lot of small sites ended up folding.

Mark Coker of Smashwords contacts Visa and was told that no such letter existed and they don't tell their cardholders what they can spend their money on unless its illegal in some way. Coker gets that in writing and flies out to Paypal and demands to see the letter he knows doesn't exist. While this is going on Selena Kitt who was the single biggest name in erotic publishing as a solo author and owned Excessia a large publisher or erotica was doing the exact same thing. The end result was PP ate crow and rescinded their BS demand, but not before it hurt a lot of people.

Truth is they could have probably just made this their rule, but when they pulled Visa into it in a blatant lie that was the end of that.

Erotic itself is a house of cards that will eventually fold, at least in the paying market. The botched SW/D2D merge could be the beginning of the end for the largest and best seller of it. Sure, amazon may still have it topped in sales, but is 24/7 games and witch hunts.

 

[FreyaGersemi]

How exactly would you envision a transaction occurring with gift cards as payment? It seems like there would need to be a lot of trust on part of both parties.

It's just with a publisher, not the general public.

 

[Writer61]

It's just with a publisher, not the general public.

A publisher paying gift cards seems very unlikely.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

A publisher paying gift cards seems very unlikely.

The word you're looking for is 'suspicious'.

 

[Sammael Bard]

Depends on how anonymous you want to go -

Paypal - you only need to give out email addresses to the donor. Paypal still has your personal details. They could also ban you for some bullshit made-up rule (they've done this before for smut content producers).

Amazon Gift Cards - Almost anonymous for both donor and recepient. Amazon does not know (or care) where the gift card came from. However, Amazon has all your personal details. If your donor has a grudge, they could report the gift cards as stolen and, theoretically, Amazon to take action against your account. Very rare to see that happen, but the possibility is still there.

Also, you are now limited to stuff you can only buy from Amazon. Very difficult to change gift card balance to cash.

Cryptocurrency - Completely anonymous. Yes, your bank knows that you are dealing in cryptocurrency (when you swap fiat for crypto and vice-versa) but they don't know what it's for. You can accept payments in USDT or any other stable-coin and cash it out in an exchange.

Problem is, very few (ethical) people/businesses want to deal in crypto. It's a hassle. There's also transaction cost of exchanges, taxation headache and scams.

Pros and cons to everything here. Lower the list, lower the ethical(?) standards of the person/business you're dealing with.

 

[Otto26]

In my research I have not found a way to do this completely anonymously *and* legally. The first rule of doing business is make it easy for people to give you money. If you're going to make them use anything other than a credit card or equivalent then you're going to lose money. Making it convenient for customers and secure for you is going to cost *you* money. And the best you are going to be able to do is pull some covers over you. Anyone who cares to put in the time is going to be able to peel back those covers eventually. Lit uses a couple of LLCs and an agent of record to wash their money so it isn't readily apparent to a casual observer where the money is coming from. But that only took 30 minutes to peel back.

Of course, Lit is smart and uses a different business model. The smut is free and it generates a lot of internet traffic which is appealing to advertisers. So they make money from selling advertising, not selling stories. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to set up some anonymity for that (and you don't have to deal with a boatload of individual payers issues). So maybe take another look at your business model?