Ask HN: How do illegal online services charge money?

Redirects to false front stores when you click on 'Buy fake Chanel' so you're actually paying notillegal.biz instead of veryillegal.biz directly. This scheme eventually is caught so they keep buying new domains and using new high risk processors. They could even be running the high risk processor themselves, if it's a successful enough illegal operation, then just reboot the scheme after being shut down.

Another way is they invent some third party payment scheme. 'This site accepts Foo vouchers and Foo gamer gold' for a ficticious game, and of course they also run the site that sells said gamer gold or vouchers for cc payments and helpfully link the buyers to it. If you're a criminal involved in organized crime you don't care about forgery and fraud setting up many phony entities to misdirect payments for as long as possible to a labyrinthe of deception until discovered.

Predation by crooks on each other online is not uncommon. You read of people selling password lists falling for obvious scams.

i wonder what would be worse... not paying taxes on revenue, or creating a parallel currency... when does mutual contras, vouchers, barter, bitcoin, etherium cross the line? what about CPU time slices, or mesh nodes, or .pdf payloads?

Cryptocurrency is often used in these circumstances, as there is (usually) no centralized body with the power to lock the law-breaking party out of their funds.