[107127] in Cypherpunks
Re: Fantasy Island
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Sat Jan 2 20:48:52 1999
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 16:56:34 -0800
To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <v04020a03b2b4447e23c9@[139.167.130.248]>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Dear Far East Economic Review:
One of your readers referred me to
> http://www.feer.com/Restricted/98dec_10/crime.html
>Fantasy Island
>Melchizedek passport scam reveals how the Internet can take
>fraud to new frontiers
>By Bertil Lintner in Bangkok
It was interesting, and is a useful reminder that while some people
want privacy because they want to be left alone, other people want it
because they're crooks who are scamming the ignorant.
It was frustrating, though, to see the amount of slack the author
gave various government officials - one Yankee said that the
scammers' "so-called banks" could be used to transfer money
"to a real tax haven such as Gibraltar or Antigua. In this way,
the origin of the money can be totally obscured."
But that's a fine and appropriate thing to do with private banks,
and the fact that there's no government charter backing it is also fine -
the fact that they _can_ be used this way indicates that the
Melchizedek gang do occasionally provide the real services they advertise.
The problem with Melchizedek is that the proprietors are frauds
who rip off their customers, make deposits disappear, claim that the
passports they sell will be recognized by other governments,
and write real-looking checks that aren't backed by anything,
giving them to people too clueless to notice (some of those victims
work for banks that _should_ be smart enough not to accept them,
but the gullibility of the mark is no justification for the fraud.)
All governments are in some sense fictional, deriving their authority
from the belief that people have in them. Most back up that authority
with armies or armed police forces, but as Gandhi demonstrated,
the cooperation of the people is still required for it to be effective;
otherwise those armies are just more bandits. If people want to
participate in virtual countries, whether non-geographical like the
Catholic Church or geography-based like the Society for Creative Anachronism,
it's as legitimate as the cooperation of the people lets it be.
And there have been legitimate new countries on islands in the Pacific -
the Minerva group in the 1970s raised the height of their reef above the UN's
1-foot-high standard, before they were invaded by Tonga -
today Tonga is selling Internet address space in their .to domain to the world.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
