There's a Bitcoin company which I will elide naming that is, perhaps unintentionally, a carder cash out bonanza. It will continue being so until Amazon cracks down.
The gist: the site lets you buy BTC with credit cards, at a substantial markup to the market price for Bitcoin (10 to 20%). The actual mechanism is by buying wish listed items on Amazon picked by the BTC "sellers." This lets the sellers use BTC on Amazon and also get a discount. The site keeps a spread.
Why is this a carder paradise? Because the only reason to ship a random address a $300 camera for $240 of consideration is the $300 you paid is not your $300. When the chargeback/fraud investigation comes in, the carder doesn't have the stolen goods and has no IRL nexus to the crime. They just have their illicit profits laundered to BTC.
I wouldn't say unintentionally it is brought up every time I've seen them discussed. It seems pretty wilful. They always claim they are ok because Amazon has really good fraud detection and wish list purchases with fraudulent credit cards aren't held against the user with the wish list.
To me that sounds like a) holding your hands over your eyes to ignore the fraud and b) like a disaster waiting to happen for anyone that uses the site regularly and ends up with a few fraudulent purchases sent to them.
Imagine regularly having goods shipped to your house from stolen/fraudulent credit cards. I see someone having the police show up at their door due to this site by the end of the year.
It's not stolen property though, it's property purchased with (presumably) fraudulent credit card details. They can prove they're not the buyer, because the buyer has a completely different name.
It's property that has been sent without payment received. It's stolen.
>They can prove they're not the buyer, because the buyer has a completely different name.
It doesn't matter the fraudulently purchased goods were shipped to your house. You are in possession of them and you're the person most likely to have committed the credit card fraud. Either way you are out the property even if you don't get investigated for credit card fraud.
Do it a few times though and it will be difficult to explain away.
If it ever came to trial, there would be no proof that you'd been the one that committed the fraud. That's where the burden of proof lies, and there's simply no evidence.
There would be a lot of evidence though. The fact that on multiple occasions items purchased with stolen credit cards were sent to you and you had not returned those items implying you were expecting them.
You'd have to come up with evidence to prove it wasn't you that ordered it and good luck with that.
Your assuming that the buyer(Purchase of say electronics) is aware how the sellers get there goods, and your just assuming all items are carded.
What happens if you linked the website on Facebook and people were like "Oh crap this is cheap" and go buy buy buy. The whole 'if its to good to be true it is' isn't going to stand up in court. The prosecution will have to prove that you knew the good where fraudulently purchased. Who know some people may use this as a legit alternative to Amazon, thinking all the items are legit (which they may well be).
I'm not assuming they are all carded. I'm assuming most will be. The discounts asked for on the site make it stupid for people to buy bitcoin with it with legitimate cards.
Then they'd likely end up with a bunch of carded stuff too.
As I said before best case situation you have to return everything you were sent and you lose your bitcoins in the process. Worse case you get an overzealous prosecutor that goes after you and tries to make the case that the number of carded things showing up at your address and claimed by you proves you were the one doing the carding. Would they win? Who knows but it'd certainly cost you more than you'd ever save to win yourself and you'd still lose the products in the short term.
No they would have to prove that you did. Now they would have an IP address of the purchaser and that's not going to be you. They could also forensicly examine your computer and find out that you have no proxy tools, or tools that may be used to commit online fraud. Then what, where do they go from there?
Nowhere but by that point you will have had your computers confiscated for the investigation(have you ever seen the condition of stuff they return?) and almost certainly had to hire a lawyer. So you're down your hardware, money for a lawyer, as well as losing the product you bought and the bitcoin that you paid.
I would be terrified to use PurseIO as a BTC "spender". I'm guessing that many of these orders end with cops knocking on the door of the spender, because they received merchandise purchased with a stolen credit card. I think it's an interesting idea, but I can't believe that many BTC holders are inviting this kind of scrutiny.
Why does the location of the product matter? The crime is the fraudulent credit card use, which is well documented by Amazon, not receiving the camera.
Oh, you mean because there is no evidence pointing to the physical location or identity of the carded.
A lot of these Brian Krebs articles seem to be little more than exposés of popular services from carding forums. Of course, I don't mean to knock his investigative reporting -- he is performing a valuable public service, and some of his stories require far more complex investigative journalism than simply reading forum posts.
But I am wondering, where are all these forums that Krebs is signed up for and reading? Also, is he fluent in Russian? I know revealing the URL's might tempt would-be cyberthieves, but personally I have my own curiosity that I would like to satisfy by reading them. I suspect there is a lot to be learned just by reading those forums (which I assume are member-only and require some kind of vetting process, anyway).
Check out Hack Forums (Skid Forums), Trojan Forge and Hack Hound. The second two are OK, but all 3 will mention other forums occasionally. Most 'good' cyber crim forums will be in russian. Also google Darkode and carder pro.
Don't check out Hackforums, Trojan Forge or Hackhound. They're not what your looking for. You won't get into Darkode. Carder.pro or carder.su is a start from there you get links to other websites, you just need to keep google and searching and you will find.
I believe he does read Russian, and poke around a few of his articles, he does sometimes provide links to the shady but still public sites he gets his information from.
> Buying luxury goods that can be resold overseas at a significant markup amplifies the fraudster’s “profit.”
> where electronics and other luxury items typically sell for a much higher price than in the United States (think new iPads and iPhones, e.g.)
iPhones and iPads are indeed much more expensive in (for example) Brazil than in the U.S.:
because the government of Brazil imposes a 50-100% luxury tax.
So I think there is validity in the article's claim that this difference amplifies the thieves' profits. However, this claim is always getting exaggerated in news reports; it's as if every stolen item gets shipped overseas because there's much more money to be made.
A variation I heard purports to explain what happens to all those stolen bicycles: the crooks ship containers full of stolen bicycles overseas where they can be sold for triple the price. If it were so much profit to be made, a legitimate business could simply buy the merchandise and export to these countries legally.
Also, in some cases, it would be very difficult to exploit the price difference whether the goods were exported legally or illegally. For example, in Singapore cars are massively more expensive than in the U.S. The government auctions off the right to put cars on the road each year. If thieves managed to get cars into Singapore, they'd still have to somehow get past a strict registration system.
> If it were so much profit to be made, a legitimate business could simply buy the merchandise and export to these countries legally.
Except, as you mention, a legitimate business needs to pay the import taxes, which are the reason the price difference exists in the first place. Carders simply ship these items without properly declaring them.
Well, that and the fact that they didn't pay for the item in the first place. Any arbitrage beyond that is just cream on top of the price of the item anyways.
Yes and no. You can run a profitable criminal enterprise just by doing the other half - buy high-value goods in the US, smuggle them into Europe, sell them there for a profit.
Even in Europe the difference is quite astonishing. A 32GB iPhone 5S in Ireland costs €799. In the US it is $649* or €480. In the case of a Mac, the difference will cover a return flight to the US.
*Without taxes, but as a tourist you can claim those back. Even taking into account taxes of both it's still a lot cheaper in the US.
Technically you are supposed to pay import tax into EU when the item is brand new, even if you bring it with you. And then the price difference between US and EU is not in your favour.
> Traditionally, fraudsters get around this restriction by turning to reshipping services that rely on “mules,” people in the United States who get recruited to reship packages after responding to work-at-home job scams. These reshipping mules are sent multiple packages containing electronics that have been purchased with stolen credit and debit cards.
Is it possible to fraud the fraudster here? You sign up for the work at home job, get a bunch of high end electronics sent to you, and then just keep it (or resell it locally).
I would even argue that the most likely scenario would be you being prosecuted as a willing participant and beneficiary in the fraud and going to PIA prison in US.
Even in those case where people were innocent(did not keep the merchandise), they still had to go to court.
The other scenario (being hurt by the scammer) is less likely but equally unappealing.
The gist: the site lets you buy BTC with credit cards, at a substantial markup to the market price for Bitcoin (10 to 20%). The actual mechanism is by buying wish listed items on Amazon picked by the BTC "sellers." This lets the sellers use BTC on Amazon and also get a discount. The site keeps a spread.
Why is this a carder paradise? Because the only reason to ship a random address a $300 camera for $240 of consideration is the $300 you paid is not your $300. When the chargeback/fraud investigation comes in, the carder doesn't have the stolen goods and has no IRL nexus to the crime. They just have their illicit profits laundered to BTC.