Field note 02 · 현장 수첩

Before You Send Payment — What Actually Burns, and What Doesn't

From the operator of 해결사. Read this before you wire anyone money — including me.

My service promises to burn your case when it ends: the mailbox, the thread, your name, everything you told me. I keep that promise. But "anonymous" is a word people stretch until it breaks, and I'd rather you know exactly where its edges are before your money moves. Any service that promises more than what follows is either lying to you or breaking the law — both are bad news for a client.

What burns

• The case mailbox created for you — deleted, threads and attachments included.
• Your name, your story, why you needed the thing done. I hold none of it after the job.
• My side of the correspondence. There is no client file, no CRM, no archive.

What doesn't burn — because I can't burn it

The payment rail. Money that moves through PayPal or a bank wire is recorded by PayPal and the banks — your name, my account, the amount, the date. That record belongs to financial institutions, not to me, and a court order can open it. No fixer on earth can burn a bank's ledger. One who says he can is selling you something else.

The tax ledger. Korean tax law requires me to keep a record of income: an amount, a date, one line of what kind of work. No name, no story, no correspondence — and it stays five years because the law says so. A service that keeps zero financial records isn't discreet, it's evading tax — and a business willing to break the law for itself will break promises to you far more cheaply.

What this means in practice

• Don't put anything in a payment memo you wouldn't put on a postcard. "Service fee" is plenty.
• If your situation requires that no money trail exists at all, I'm not your answer — nobody legal is.
• Everything else — what was done, where, for whom, why — dies with the case mailbox. That's the part that matters, and it's the part I control.