First, I want to say that the word “ancap” does not go well with the word “international” or the word “crimes,” because “international” is used today as a synonym for “interstate,” and “crime” means a violation of the law, which, again, does not exist under ancap; instead, there are many private rules and preferences that form spontaneous orders. So I will have to translate the question from statist to ancap before I begin to answer.
So, how are property rights violations handled in an anarcho-capitalist society when using global market tools? Let’s take carding as an example.
One of the popular carding business chains today looks roughly like this:
1. Using holes in the security systems of banks and online stores, hackers steal databases of credit card data.
2. Carders buy these databases in parts for further use.
3. A carder uses the stolen credit card data to buy goods from an online store.
4. The goods sent by the store are received by a drop.
5. The drop shares part of the cost of the goods with the carder and sells the product.
6. The carder launders the money received and gets a clean profit.
Don’t think anything strange—all these materials can be Googled in five seconds, and in half an hour you’ll have more knowledge about carding than I managed to acquire 😉
So, the peculiarity of this high-tech criminal business is the developed division of labor, the use of advanced anonymization technologies at every stage, and, accordingly, a rather high cost of catching even one of the chain participants, let alone unraveling the whole thing.
Another feature related to carding is that the cardholder is insured against such fraud through a bank chargeback procedure, and the bank, in turn, passes the costs onto the online store. Thus, the final victims and the main parties interested in the destruction of this criminal industry are the online retailers, and their primary tool is by no means the search for fraudsters, but the improvement of protection, which they can perfectly well do whether a state exists or not, since it seems to have no role here, as it apparently does not affect anything.
In reality, it does. State regulations make it difficult for stores to switch to cryptocurrency payments—which, unlike centralized banking systems, knows no such concept as reversing an operation, meaning it completely removes the store from the line of fire in such situations and makes the final victim the one who lost the private key to their crypto wallet.
In the absence of a state, it will be harder for banks to pass costs onto retailers because they will have to compete honestly in a free market with crypto and offer stores the most favorable acquiring terms possible. So they will at least have to obsess over data protection, implement two-factor authentication for online purchases across the board, and so on, and if a refund request does occur, they will mostly have to bear the losses themselves. Which is great; let them stay sharp.
So, can carders feel safe under ancap? This will depend on the strategy banks use. If they focus on passive defense, carders will be drawn into a technological race, which will increase the cost and intellectual threshold for engaging in the carding business. But defense can also be active. The market can be flooded with fake drops who will scam the carders, fake database sellers who will sell non-existent credit card details and try to report their buyers to the customer, moles can be planted in themed communities—in short, this criminal industry can be made significantly more costly and risky than it is now, and this could also lead to most criminal entrepreneurs retraining for something more innocent.
