On the legality of public charitable donations from darknet vendors

I've recently been thinking about TripWithScience's public donation to the Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund from a couple months back. While very generous on his part, it seemed pretty misguided to me for several reasons.

His primary concerns in making it public were that 1. the funds could somehow be used to estimate how big his operation is and that 2. the community would look at the donation as either "too much or too little", both of which are pretty ridiculous.

To me, the far bigger worry is that the feds or the charity could easily determine that the donation came from a drug dealer and freeze the funds. I'm not a lawyer and I doubt a case like this has ever happened before the advent of the darknet markets, but I've got to assume that donations on behalf of a criminal enterprise are of shaky legal standing. I know that charities are usually forced to return money when donations are tied to fraud, as was the case with Bernie Madoff's charitable contributions. How darknet vendors would tie into this seems pretty open to interpretation though, as there's not actually any wronged parties involved and unless LE seizes a vendor's computer and funds, they couldn't really prove how the money was earned (assuming that a vendor doesn't make the mistake of sending the donation directly from their market account).

I'm also concerned about how a third party could verify that a vendor actually donated if the charity in question uses a bitpay address, as is the case with the Nepal Relief Fund. Seems like it would be very easy for someone to send the "donation" to another one of their bitcoin addresses and claim credit; is there a way to make sure that didn't happen without alerting the charity?

Now, I doubt the feds are going to go after a $5000 donation from a shroom vendor, and looking through the blockchain history, it appears as though TripWithScience actually made the donation. That being said, it still seems like a terrible idea to publicly donate in this manner. Which is a shame, because it's a great idea in theory that could be a great marketing tool for vendors, help promote a more sympathetic outlook of darknet markets to the general public, and perhaps even lead to a shorter sentence should these vendors ever get caught.

Here's my proposed solution: A few vetted member from the community could act as as go-betweens for these donations. Journalists like deepdot and OzFreelancer would be particularly useful in this role, as they could help promote the donations to the public and make a page listing all the involved vendors and their contributions. Perhaps a marketplace could participate as well and add a tiered "donor flair" system that would further highlight the vendors involved (example: "bronze star" flair for $100+ contributions, "gold star" flair for $500+ contributions, etc..) I know I personally would actively seek out vendors that donates portions of their profit to charity, and I suspect many other buyers would as well.

Thoughts?


Comments


[2 Points] None:

Doubt they can freeze the funds, its not illegal to take a drug dealers money, it is illegal to accept stolen money. I feel like I need at least two sentences to respond to an essay long post.