This makes no sense and is clearly an incredibly biased view. I have mained a civilian character for over 1000 hours, although the odd crime is committed, it's not the foundation of the character.
There are a ton of civilian characters who pride themselves in being legal. Take people like Joe...
I personally have a free Revolut bank account to circumvent this issue, they include both an online and a physical card which work as a credit debit card (you need money in the account to process it, so no US credit card debt simulator). There's other banks like Openbank that offer the same.