The Perils of KYC; The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15
The Perils of KYC; The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15
Most Americans have very little choice but to provide their personal information to credit bureaus. Hackers have found a way into that data supply chain, and are advertising access in group chats used by violent criminals who rob, assault, and shoot targets.
I would not even worry about that. The biggest threat is an ever growing tyrannical state that will know every transaction you ever make and apply punishments to anything they decide to be outside of their interest.
I think it's prudent to worry about both.
The tyrannical states may have more reach and can choose to either move decisively or boil the frogs slowly using their near unlimited access to funding and try to cloak themselves in some manner of unearned legitimacy that a disturbing portion of the population goes along with.
But if a violent person shows up demanding your property, it really only matters what affiliation they claim if you and your property survive the altercation intact. If you do, then your issue becomes with things like recourse, courts and so on. In the moment of conflict, the group the thug claims to be a member of, if any, matters very little.
Yes you should be prepared for both. However you can easily deal with some scumbag trying to rob you. If the state targets you they will keep coming forever.
Terrifying, but I'm confused why this is in the monero community and not privacy.
I don't see the link to Monero
I'm not the original poster, but I tink they may have meant to draw a connection between credit bureaus collecting sensitive personal financial and identity information that can reveal potential targets to criminals and KYC, which has the same danger.
Both collect sensitive financial information and when leaked or leveraged by bad actors could be used to targert well heeled people or low hanging fruit, both in crypto and tradfi.
One of Monero's great strengths is that it helps with this. But a lot of that perceived protection through obfuscation of wallet value is harmed when it is acquired using KYC because that can reveal things like who has how much.
Unlike BTC or other public ledgers, the threat actor would have to hope you still had that much in your possession since they couldn't verify the balance on the blockchain in real time. But if someone had huge amounts of value shown acquired through KYC, even if moved into private XMR wallets, it would be a relatively safe bet that they still controlled enough liquid value in currency or other goods to target.