Financing Terrorism Through Prepaid Cards

Welcome back to another week of Insight Intelligence! This week we’re looking at how terrorist financing happens through prepaid cards. We will likely also have a terrorist financing news roundup later in the week, and we might also have a new terrorist attack profile to share. We’ll continue our enhanced production schedule for the foreseeable future —we quite enjoy publishing two or more articles per week, and we hope you enjoy reading them!

In June, a man in the United States was arrested and charged with concealing terrorist financing. Mateo Ventura allegedly purchased a number of gift cards and provided the access codes to his contact (whom he believed to be a member of ISIS, but was actually an online covert employee - OCE). The contact told Ventura that he sold the gift cards online on a dark web marketplace, and sent the funds to ISIS.¹

While a rarer method of terrorist financing, this particular case is interesting in its use of dark web marketplaces, and is worth understanding more detail, particularly in terms of identifying this type of activity in subjects of interest or investigation.