Harlan Voss

Background

I spent four years in payments compliance, on the side of the desk that asks for the documents. My job was to open a scan of someone's driver's license, a utility bill and a selfie, and decide whether the account belonged to the person named on it. I read thousands of those files.

Most were tedious. A handful were straightforward fraud. Plenty were ordinary people who had no idea that a $60 deposit had just put a photograph of their passport on a server in a country they could not have located on a map. That is why I write about this now.

What I cover

Verification and the data behind it: what operators collect, which third party vendors hold it, how long it is retained, and where an anonymous player's identity actually leaks. That last one is almost never the casino. It is the exchange that sold the coins.

How I work

I read the full terms, including the discretionary verification clause and the maximum cashout clause. I make small deposits with my own money and try to take the money back out, because the signup page is not where verification bites. The withdrawal is.

What I will not write

That anonymous play is untraceable, that any operator is 100% anonymous, or any figure I did not verify. Anonymity here is a spectrum, not a switch.