Black-global credit-card scamming: Fleabites and Mules

(((It may be that the most interesting part of this very interesting report is that the vigilante getting the reporter up to speed is himself anonymous. We're starting to build ourselves a full-scale shadow world here, where even the operatives who track the scammers work under pseudonyms and could be anywhere on the planet.)))

(((And if you think THAT'S something, just wait till the intelligence services start really ramping up and running zillion-dollar Area 51 black-world operations out of weird, physically restricted desert compounds. Why, THREAT LEVEL
and DANGER ROOM will have to become the same blog!)))

(((This trial is kind of a common-or-garden crime story about
ID theft and money laundering – but who is she laundering money FOR? She doesn't know. She didn't wanna know.
She's never gonna know. The guy who's having his money laundered probably doesn't know. I'd rather imagine he set up a few clickware automated programs and is off sipping vodka tonics in Barcelona right now.)))

(((Did YOU get robbed by this scam? Maybe. Does thirteen bucks, on a per-hour basis, make it worth your while to figure that out? Especially considering that you, or the local cops, or even professionals you hire, would never catch the guy who "did it"? Probably not, eh?)))

(((Welp, feed the vampires a few extra milligrams of blood out of your financial bloodstream, then... my, they're getting bigger every day.)))

http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Analysis/2008/02/25/analysis_detroit_trial_shows_cyber-scam/3605/

Link: Analysis: Detroit trial shows cyber-scam - UPI.com.

(...)

"The investigator, an IT consultant who posts on the Internet forum Broadbandreports.com using the name MGD and tracks cyber-fraudsters in his spare time, shared the results of his investigation with UPI on condition his real name was not revealed, saying he feared retaliation from the scammers.

MGD said the scam had been running in various permutations for at least four years. It involves the recruitment of a U.S. "mule" by a marketing Web site (Lasinkas' was based in Lithuania), or e-mail. The mule, told that the scam is a genuine marketing program, is instructed to set up a U.S. company, and a merchant account for it, which allows credit-card payments to be processed from a Web site.

"The mule is the key," he said, pointing out that a U.S. taxpayer ID number is needed to open the account and banks will require an ID check from a real person before the funds can be wired abroad.

The mule is told to keep a percentage of the charges as a fee, and wire the remainder of the proceeds to Inowest Enterprises Inc. at the Bulgarian bank.
(((He's Bulgarian, he's Lithuanian, he's got an American cut-out ID... welcome to modern crime.)))

But the payments collected by the Web site are bogus, said MGD, made to huge numbers of credit cards whose numbers have been stolen or compromised in some other way. The scam relies on the fact that many card holders do not check their statements carefully enough to notice the bogus charges, and those who do and contact the Web site receive a prompt refund. (((How nice!)))

This is done, said MGD, to avoid the $20 so-called charge-back fee that credit card companies will levy on the fake Web site if the customer complains to their card issuer.

MGD, who has been tracking the scam for more than two years and has contacted "seven or eight" mules, says that at any one time he is aware of "probably 30 sites active, each charging up to $40,000 a month."

MGD says that the scammers deliberately set out to recruit mules with "zero knowledge of how e-commerce or the Internet works."

He characterized the mules he had traced as "naive dupes."

"They should be charged with stupidity," he said.

"They don't really have a clue," he said, adding that most of the mules had shut down the accounts they set up once he explained the scam to them, and several had cooperated with his efforts to track the scammers, passing him details of the account to which the funds are wired, and sharing with him the instructions and contracts the scammers had sent them, and other e-mail communication. "They are not career criminals," he said.

MGD said one mule had cooperated to the extent of holding $20,000 worth of funds from the scam in the company account, to see if Lasinkas could be lured out into the open to collect them. The effort failed.

"Anyone who will walk away from $20,000 is obviously making a lot more than that," he said. (((Yup!)))