Don’t Send Your Bitcoins to ISIS

The thing is, if you go to the web page for ISIS, and you click the “Donate for Terrorism” button, and you type in $150,000 as the donation amount, and you click “pay by credit card,” and you type in your credit card number, your bank is not going to process that payment. This is so obviously the case that I assume that ISIS does not in fact have a website with a donate-by-credit-card button, though I have not actually looked for one and do not intend to, thank you very much. On the other hand if you want to buy Bitcoins on your credit card and send them to ISIS … look, really really really don’t do that, but it seems to … work? Actually it doesn’t even need to be your credit card; a faked or stolen credit card can work too:

That’s from an article titled “Long Island Woman Admits To Using Bitcoin To Launder Money For ISIS,” and, again, I cannot stress this enough, do not do that. But beyond this being a bad and criminal idea for this Long Island woman, it does seem like at least a possible failure of compliance by … well … someone else? Like either the banks issuing her the fraudulently obtained credit cards need to do a better job of asking credit applicants “are you going to use this card to buy Bitcoins for ISIS,” or the Bitcoin exchanges that took her credit cards as payment for Bitcoins need to do a better job of asking “are you going to send these Bitcoins to ISIS,” or both. I suppose even best-practices compliance procedures will nonetheless allow a few errors to slip through the cracks—she could click “no” to answer those questions, etc.—but you can see how U.S. regulators might have fairly limited tolerance for this sort of thing.