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Feds Bust a Dark-Web Counterfeit Coupon Kingpin
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: The dark web has become the go-to corner of the Internet to buy drugs, stolen financial data, guns...and counterfeit coupons for Clif bars and condoms? The FBI indicted Beauregard Wattigney yesterday for wire fraud and trademark counterfeiting on digital black market sites Silk Road and Silk Road 2. Wattigney allegedly spoofed coupons for dozens of products and sold collections of them online in exchange for Bitcoin. The FBI accused him of doing $1 million worth of collective damage to the companies he made coupons for, but a fraud consultancy believes the total financial cost of his actions was much higher. Wattigney also offered expensive lessons that taught people how to make their own coupons. "In his tutorials, [he] explained the simple breakdown of barcode creation using the increasingly universal GS1 standard: GS1 codes begin with a 'company prefix' that can be copied from any of the company's products. The next six digits are the 'offer code,' which can be any random number for a counterfeit coupon, followed by the savings amount listed in cents and the required number of item purchases necessary to receive the discount."
Who takes the loss the retailer or the manufacturer?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm going to make fake coupons that makes the grocery store give me 10 dollars for every item I buy!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I remember seeing coupons like this and guides how to produce them circulating on 4chan, atleast half a decade ago. Alot of people were using them to get steep discounts on PS3s as I recall.
A technician for ITT Technical Institute, that explains a lot, that whole private college is rotten.
Stephen Mulkins: 2 weeks ago
I'm embarrassed to even say I went to this school. I've been laughed out of an interview before because they told me I didn't get a real education. I have since removed ITT Tech from my resume altogether to avoid further humiliation. It's better to have no college experience than to be educated by ITT Tech apparently. I'm just depressed that I have tens of thousands of dollars to pay back for a worthless degree now. If I could go back in time I would do anything I could to stop myself from going here. What a major failure this whole experience this has been.
Dana Mehaffey:2 weeks ago
I unfortunately went to this school. I thought I was going to make a bright future to myself but thanks to ITT my future has been nothing but dark. Career services tried to get me a job making $11 an hour. What a joke. I think they use Craigslist and Monster to find jobs for their students. It's a shame really. If they just spent as much money on classroom supplies and quality teachers as they do on advertising, this might actually be a decent school. Instead they saddle you with unmanageable debt before your career even starts.
Sa33y McS43 3 weeks ago
ITT Technical Institute tricked me into signing up for high interest private student loans that were never explained to me. Private student loans were never once mentioned to either me or my mother and father. They rushed us through the entire sign up process and I was just an excited 18 year old fresh out of high school thinking I was doing the right thing. I don't think I passed the entrance exam but the ITT Tech salesman told me that I did anyway. I wanted so badly to believe him and so I did. All I ever wanted to do was go to college and get a decent education and a great paying job. I had no idea that it was all smoke and mirrors. I attended between 2004 and 2006 and here is my experience of that time there. What they offered me was absolutely in no way what was described or advertised. My grades and GPA were artificially inflated by administration in order to keep the schools average GPA up, they were actually caught doing this. The classrooms were completely outdated, the ...
Bickford Bukis 2 weeks ago
Predatory lenders. There is a website called my itt experience dot com that has hundreds and thousands of ITT Tech horror stories. There are also plenty of stories from former employees that expose this school for the scam that it is. Check out their stock by doing a Google search for $ESI and you will see that their
stock is completely tanking due to fraud charges.
Steven Smith 2 weeks ago
I am disgusted that I have been swindled by such smooth talkers. They have completely changed my life for the worse. I am in debt close to $50,000 and I have been paying my loans off for about 10 years now. They didn't help me find a job to make anywhere close to enough money to pay back my loans in a reasonable amount of time. The whole program was a complete joke and I wasted my time and my life because of 2 years at this school. Please do not go here if you value your future and education, you will get neither from them. They will lie to you and stab you right in the back. All they want is your money and they don't want to give you a decent education for it.
Jimmy Smith 2 weeks ago
Terrible, terrible fraud of a company. Can't wait to see them go under like Corinthian and Everest Colleges did. Shame on you ITT Tech for putting hundreds of thousands if not millions of young kids into tens of thousands of dollars in debt. You really helped these young people at the start of their careers.
Becky Hill 2 weeks ago
This scam of a school is on it's way to chapter 11 bankruptcy. I've been paying my loans for 15 years and the principal balance has gone down only a few thousand dollars. It's absolutely insane the interest rates they tricked me into signing up for. I thought I
0. Along with all the other tracking data, log coupons and reference either loyalty membership or credit/debit card tokens.
1. When take coupon is detected upon redemption to the manufacturer, score the shopper up for coupon fraud.
2. Score reaches threshold, shopper is first denied any coupons (this takes a slight change in rules).
3. Also deny discounts based on loyalty programs (rules changed here).
4. Shoppers find no value in fake coupons, stop going to sites that peddle fakes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
With entirely fabricated coupons, the manufacturer knows which offer codes are legit, and what amounts they should map to. They'll simply reject all counterfeits, and the retailer takes it in the proverbial shorts for the discount. Manufacturers could fix this by sharing all legit coupon codes with retailers (similar to the UPC system), but this would be cumbersome and since there's little benefit to the manufacturers, they don't.
For the second type of counterfeit where it's a fake copy of a legit coupon (you see this a lot with "free item" and deep-discount coupons that are sold by consumer product companies to say, appliance manufacturers or retailers. (i.e. "Buy this overpriced washer and get a six-month supply of Tide Detergent") it all depends on if the manufacturer spots the fake or not... If they do, the retailer eats it; if they don't the manufacturer does. Most of this type of coupons increasingly have security measures like holograms, thermo-sensitive colored ink, etc. to make the job easier on the manufacturer; doesn't help the retailer much though... they'll be able to know that, for instance all P&G coupons have certain security measures, but this won't work for smaller brands.
I actually had a job for a couple of years designing 'advanced' POS system software based on the industry standards. The items that the retailers considered 'advanced' just amazed me. They seemed like basic items to me. That said, it is almost impossible to protect against this until they changed the coupon codes to something like QR codes that they could digitally sign. The current standard was made long time ago and is very limited in the amount of information it can carry.
/ This is a simple standard anyone can google that shows exactly how these bar codes are laid out. I used that myself when implementing that section of code. Why anyone would pay for it is beyond me. At the end of the day, the retailers know there is going to be some fraud on this. They have switched to all of these automated checkout systems to save money on cashiers, who would likely catch this sort of thing, so I don't really feel sorry for them at all. They have made that trade.
That said, there are some safeguards in there. If your coupon total is unusually high, your checkout will lock up and require approval from the person watching up front. So anything outrageous will likely be caught. Also, you better pay with cash, as the transaction is all tied together to your card. Also, don't use a loyalty program. So at the end of the day is all that hassle worth it to maybe save a couple of dollars? Conversely, though, I guess the checkers care less and less every day as they get replaced by machines and probably just hit the 'ok' button most of the time, and the retailers eat it as just cost of doing business.
Myself, I would not suggest it as it is punishable by law. It is worth going to jail to save a relative few dollars off your bill?
I hope this scam works, and that it will mean the death of coupons as an inducement. When I think of the time expended cutting them out, fiddling with them on every shopping trip, and snipe hunts for products we don't usually buy but-there's-a-great coupon-this-week, I will rejoice at the extra time that awaits us in our future. Then consider the time and money expended by retailers and by manufacturers. Wouldn't we save just as much if coupons didn't exist at all? Whenever I'm out shopping by myself, ignoring the whole coupon world when I do price/value analysis, I find I'm saving just as much.
But coupons will persist so long as they keep appealing to the wives of this world.
Well, there goes my weekend.
Have gnu, will travel.
I remember working in a print shop in the 70's (yea, I'm old) and every week we would print 100 pages of expired coupons for a grocery store. The owner would cut them or rip them apart and submit them to the manufacturer. I only found out when I stopped the press and told the owner that we were printing old coupons. He explained the scam.
What with the Internet, you might think that there would be some sort of validation built into the system? Apparently not...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't get the thought behind coupons being (outside of this) subject to simply photocopying if you want more (illegally, of course). If coupons had individual unique barcodes and a till that "phoned home" cancelling the barcode once it's used, fraud would be almost impossible. The only fraud left would be copying those barcodes before the coupons made it into the customer's hands. Coupons are typically low value enough that's not worth the effort (unlike back when similar fraud would happen with gift cards).
It just makes no sense at all nowadays.
"Beauregard Wattigney" Even a google image search confirms this...
The losses will be passed on to us in the form of higher prices.
The CEO wants their yacht and will not accept a smaller bonus.
I hate those people and their giant binders of coupons. Why? Because if you get stuck behind one in line, they double or triple the wait time.
If you PUT OUT A STANDARD THAT HAS ZERO AUTHENTICATION and expect it to not be abused then you deserve what you get. Now there may be some victims here, but don't go putting the blame on the fraudster(s) or those making the tools. They're only able to do that because of poor business and industry practices. This is how your tax dollars get wasted and why I'm sick and tired of paying for "security" that doesn't serve me.
I own a business and we DO get targeted for high end fraud. Though it's credit card fraud, not coupon fraud. The reality is I'm a victim as the owner of the business. However the blame is not on the fraudster, but the payment card processing industry. Every time there is a merchant who is targeted its "weak security". The problem isn't necessarily the weak security of the merchant, but a broken system the payment card industry doesn't care to fix because they're making money off it.
We take additional steps to authenticate customers and it pisses some customers off. Understandably so. We don't ask you to scan your ID or anything like that. Only authenticate that you have access to the account of the card your using. It's far from perfect, but its the best you can do when all a fraudster needs is a few simple # that are handed out like candy by consumers by design.
I can understand peddling heroin, slaves, nuclear weapons and so forth. But COUPONS! Some things just go beyond the pale.
If you go to prison for coupon fraud, could you get a prison tattoo of a barcode with information encoded to reduce your sentence?
"but a fraud consultancy believes the total financial cost of his actions was much higher"
no sh*t, they want to be hired by the legal team suing the guy
How about getting rid of coupons altogether and just offer the lowest possible price.