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Given this is going through traditional payment infrastructure it should be easy enough to follow the money, no?
by jakear 5y ago
Given this is going through traditional payment infrastructure it should be easy enough to follow the money, no?
- post_break 5y agoYou could wash this fast with gift cards like microsoft support scammers. What's funny though is the amount is so low. Maybe at the most $5-10 a person. I can't imagine you getting a large sum of money through this before being shut down.
- colinmhayes 5y agoI assume everyone is paying with credit cards, so I don't see how gift cards would help. The scammers probably live in a country with lax law enforcement with regards to hacking, so they can just deposit the money into their account when the credit card company sends it.
- post_break 5y agoYou get money from the payment processor then cash out into gift cards. It's a lot harder to track a gift card vs it going to a bank account. You then churn the gift card into cash at a discount rate using a gift card reselling website.
- colinmhayes 5y agoCan you buy gift cards without depositing the money into an account you control? Once it's in the account just buy crypto or whatever. I thought the gift card scams happen because credit card companies refuse to pay out to companies that get accused of scamming.
- aspenmayer 5y agoThere are sites and apps that sell gift cards for crypto, and converting fiat to crypto is already pretty easy.
- Too 5y agoScammer never deposit the money into any account, they put the credit card nr straight into the payment-form to buy gift-card.
- NortySpock 5y agoYeah, and you can follow the money all the way to the crypto wallet where it was converted to something harder to track or harder to revert transactions on...
- jakear 5y agoSure, but that still introduces at least one nameable real world entity that can officials can convince to stop processing transactions.
- heywire 5y agoAre they even processing a payment, or are they just capturing your account number to sell?
- jakear 5y agoGood point. I hate web3 as much as the next HN’er but “buy things and engage in recurring subscriptions via easily-canceled smart contracts without giving your full account details to a random third party” is a compelling proposition.
- notdang 5y agoyes, they're processing the payment and it goes through Stripe.