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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 13, 2023

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I just wish you could setup logic for this. Pulling out your phone to hold the power button for 3 seconds and then tapping the lockdown button is slow, very obvious, and likely to be prevented by an attacker.

Would be great if I could set it up to lockdown on a specific finger, or a specific number of presses on an analog button. Or even like if I leave a WiFi network or some other arbitrary condition.



Cake Pay is registered in St Kitts, for instance. But it doesn’t matter. Playing the ignorant middle man can get you legal for the most part.

And I guarantee you that their source of cards is not directly from the retailer.

But whatever. If you don’t want to believe me and just want to run with binders on for that sweet 30% off your Amazon purchase, that’s your business.


Being a “registered business” doesn’t mean anything. Especially when they’re in loose jurisdictions with little to no laws or enforcement. And it sure doesn’t mean they aren’t sketchy and the origin of the cards isn’t ethically dubious or even illegal.

You don’t ever wonder how they pay like 50% (or less) on the card’s face value and resell them at 70-80% for a profit?

I worked a bit on a competitor service and the brokers are all not people I ever want to interact with again. We tried to pierce the veil a little bit and the least sketchy source examples we got were like mechanical turk workers getting paid in gift cards (wage theft basically), and immigrants trying to send money back home to their family from the US (something crypto was supposed to help with).


And be sure that Visa and MasterCard are mining your data.


The whole gift card secondary market is sketchy as fuck though. I’ve dipped my foot in a bit and it seems like most of the inventory is the result of scammers converting their gains into usable currency.

Not all of it for sure. Sometimes people just want to unload gift cards they’ll never use. But that seems like the exception rather than the rule.

Like, why is this dude from Nigeria selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of US-locked gift cards?

Also, all these large companies and regulatory bodies are completely aware of this shit. I don’t know why it’s tolerated.


Pseudonymous data isn’t anonymous. And they can probably just match it to your CC info anyway.