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Shady Reshipping Centers Exposed
Dynamoo writes "Ever wondered how criminals can spirit away the products they buy with stolen credit cards? The answer is that they use surprisingly sophisticated but very shady reshipping centers to launder the goods on their way to Eastern Europe. The bad guys make the money, but it's the mules doing the reshipping who will eventually get caught."
"Socialize risk, privatize profit" works well in the underworld too. If you're on the right end of the deal.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Reshipping centers only exist because some big corporations refuse to sell their goods to the whole world, causing people to look for ways to pretend to be in the US so they can order the stuff.
Wouldn't it be very easy for the police to infiltrate this sort of thing? Just respond to a couple of ads on craiglist, then trace the packages to their final destination.
in this day and age almost everything you do at work is tracked. The retail workers have to log into their cash register so management knows who is ringing up how many purchases for their performance metrics. On the other hand if you have say 10,000 compromised credit cards and 500 are somehow linked to the same cashier person at Macy's and others linked to a few other people around town it makes you think it may not be a coincidence.
yet these people take part in these scams that are easily caught and for very little money when you think about it long term
What I'm having a hard time understanding is why people are willingly doing this? What excuses are the "managers" using to convince people that this is legitimate? Having high dollar consumer goods coming in and then shipping them out to a different address should just be a giant red flag to nearly anyone in this day and age. Are these people that desperate for a job that they're willing to turn a blind eye to it or are the "managers" somehow convincing people that this is on the up and up?
It's always the prostitute, the low-level drug dealer, the addict drug runner, etc. who end up in jail. The pimps and high-level drug dealers always walk away clean. Cops have learned that it's a lot easier to go after the low-level easy target than to do the *real* work of busting the scum at the top. That's not to excuse what the low-level scum does, but still, if the cops REALLY wanted to make a dent in this crap (and not just get some press *looking* like they're doing something), they would be taking on the guys who this stuff was shipped *too*. Don't tell me the U.S. couldn't put pressure on Russia and other eastern European counties to deal with this stuff if they really wanted to.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
1) Set up in a foreclosed house somewhere
2) Answer ad on Craigslist for reshipping job
3) Keep merchandise, send out packages weighted with bricks
4) Disappear before 1st package arrives in Russia
5) Profit???
Many shops don't want to ship stuff with good old fashioned US Mail and insist on using Fedex/UPS (at huge cost). Unfortunately, large parts of the world is only served by the Post system. So I frequently need to use a reshipping agent just to get some damned thing delivered to my mailbox.
Will somebody PLEASE think of the...prostitutes, dealers, and drug runners? I mean, they're really the heart and soul of our illicit underground, and if we don't save them from this sort of senseless abuse by our police, what does that say about the rest of us?
Mozy, free online backup service
--
So the fedex package was dropped off there in lawnside, NJ... the one ups is awaiting receiver pick-up but my guess its going to be like the other ups shipment.. requires a signature, the person isn't home at the time, and ends up being sent back or something.. though the one returned to sender ups shipment was because the person living there refused delivery saying they didn't order it...
And let them just ship all they want and they will never get them back.
1060 west addison Chicago, IL 60613
If the focus of this story were on the use of stolen credit cards to buy software in order to pirate it, the Slashdot angle would be completely different:
"ZOMG! Credit card companies STEAL MONEY from the PUBLIC DOMAIN! Software companies STEAL CREATIVITY from the OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY!! Let's all support the PIRATES with PayPal donations, because SHARING IS CARING!!"
Now, suddenly, you're all on the side of the law. Assholes.
Lonely guy meets hot girl chatting on singles site, then packages start showing up one day and she asks you to just stick label she supplies and mail it on because she can't get shipping company to deliver directly. Then packages keep coming but she's assures you its all ok and when you check on one of the packages the company shipping to you says its legitimate. In fact she tells you you can even keep something for yourself, Then a WISE friend finds out and says DUH!, its probably stolen and she is really a guy and she does not actually know you or love you. The guy doing the shipping suspected but she(?) Kept reassuring him everything was legitimate, and was going to come visit hime soon. He just needed someone to smack him hard with a reality stick. At some point the investigators came calling, luckly he had already returned all and had blocked incomings shipments.
If FedEx, UPS and USPS worked with the Credit Card companies and the Police, this could be stopped quickly. Once a known fraudulent card is used to ship to an address, mark all shipments to that address as suspicious, and track them down to their source.
Yes, it'd be a huge data mining operation, and yes Congress would have to pass some laws to bypass anti-trust laws, but it's feasible. No, you'd never get the legislature, law enforcement and business to agree on enough to make this work.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Seems rather amazing to me that nobody is stepping in and just receiving the items without reshipping them. Or shipping boxes filled with junk instead of the electronics.
Disclaimer: I do not suggest doing this, and wish to strongly emphasize that any stolen merchandise received by anyone should be immediately returned to the store it was stolen from.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
WTF? I've never seen anyone defend credit card theft for any purpose on here. Leave and take your straw man with you.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Online retailers typically get some kind of notice of a fraudulent credit card within a day or so of charging/shipping a product right? So, in theory, if someone handling a drop were notified by the retailer that they have stolen goods and should ship it back, all would be well, right? If the person handling the drop doesn't intend criminal behavior, they can just ship it back, and no need to get stuck doing anything illegal. In addition, these online retailers have to have records of refused credit cards, if they cross-reference the bad cards with who has been shipped to, they should have some correlating groups of numbers/people on which to place suspicion of being a drop. This should translate into a mandatory 1-3 day delay before shipping to those people. Seems like there's lots of options to shut down these kinds of operations at the source.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Couldn't we make this much more difficult if we simply required the item sale and the shipping to be charged to 2 different credit cards from the same billing address if the shipping address on the order isn't the same as the billing address on the card used? Sure it would make buying and shipping Christmas presents a bit more of a hassle, but the crook would need TWO of your cards in order to fraudulently buy anything.
Could be a terrible idea, but seems pretty simple and only a minor inconvenience.
The US Postal Service made a series of CSI-type movies a few years ago...one of them was "Work @Home Scams" and covered remailers:
Work @Home Scams
It's well done for a government video...though why the government needs to be making action movies is a separate question.
Advice: on VPS providers
Golf clap for the "from the shady-shipping-containers-make-cool-houses dept.", that's perfect.
It all sounds like proxy servers for physical goods.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Steal 100 bucks and you are a theif and go to jail. Steal 100 billion and you get paid by the government to keep stealing.
Use one of those empty up for foreclosure houses a couple of blocks over. If you just happened to be in the front yard doing work when they deliveries are usually made, you might not even need to break into he place.
The shipping centers the article refers to are NOT the legitimate drop-shipping centers somebody in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. can use in order to order grey-market products.
The article is referring to the people in the US that act as a drop-shipper for merchandise purchased using stolen credit cards. The merchandise is shipped overseas where it then becomes nearly impossible to track down who it's going to and recover the goods. Since the goods are purchased with stolen credit cards, they can be offered to the eventual buyer at a significant discount to the actual cost. (No matter what price the eventual destination was supposed to charge.)
Yes, there is a legitimate reason for reshippers to exist. But if you are running a legit reshipping business, you have absolutely no reason to farm it out to random schmucks working out of their house. Indeed, there are a huge number of reasons NOT to do so, the need to prevent theft being the primary one. A single person can physically re-ship hundreds of packages a day; why would a legit business farm it out to a huge number of people, each of which only ships a handful a day?
But just like other work-at-home scams, the process relies on vaguely logical premises that make no sense when carried to conclusion. People desperate for a job aren't necessarily going to put a whole lot of thinking into what looks like a lifeline.
These poor "reshippers" get visited by the cops all the time. Their (usually perfectly valid) defense is that they were unwitting gullible dupes in a scam. That defense isn't going to work so well when the cops see stacks of new boxes in your living room.
How else do you think hackers get hold of the software they crack the first place?
By fucking buying it off a store shelf or getting a rip of a legitimately purchased copy?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, in most cases it starts with a stolen credit card. FACT. How else would the basement-dwelling teenage scumbags get their hands on (for example) dongled software costing thousands of dollars?
Well I know I've seen some cracking groups soliciting donations to purchase the next piece of software to be cracked. I challenge you to find a source for your "fact." MPAA/RIAA propaganda don't count.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"MPAA/RIAA propaganda don't count" ... ah yes, of course. In the aspie worldview, evidence that conflicts with your way of seeing the world is "propaganda".
And by the way, one big glaring hole in your "logic" is that it's ok to "donate" to crackers, but not to pay for software. How do you square that?