3 ms·

Do they not buy gift cards anymore? Back in the day you used carding to buy gift cards and then use the gift cards to buy the merch to resell. Gives you more ti

Do they not buy gift cards anymore? Back in the day you used carding to buy gift cards and then use the gift cards to buy the merch to resell. Gives you more time since the card could be cancelled quickly after first use and gift card is hard to trace.

filoleg 3y ago
The OP says that the issue is that the scammers live in countries to which most western merchants refuse to ship anymore due to high prevalence of scams originating there (eastern europe, russia, etc.) and near zero ability to enforce the law against them by the US authorities. For all we know, those items sent to US-located “drops” (aka unaware victims and accessories to the crime) for shipping overseas were indeed bought with gift cards. That’s beside the point, the problems that those SWAT services are supposed address are explicitly related to shipping items (which were purchased with stolen credit cards, either directly or by using gift cards) to countries where most western merchants refuse to ship in the first place. Gift cards won’t even be needed here, since the only person who can get pinned for this is the US-based “drop” who was unknowingly helping out the criminals.
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  It's physical onion routing/proxying to obscure the true origin of the scams and spread it over such a wide area (the world), or such a powerful and wealthy area (U.S.) that cutting off business in those regions is impossible because you'd put yourself out of business in doing so. The exit nodes, or true origins are the pockets of the folks running the whole scheme. Good luck finding them, and even if they are found, they are insanely wealthy, so nothing will come of it, because that's how the world works.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > they are insanely wealthy The OP mentions that the main guy running the SWAT service makes roughly $100k/mo at most. While it is certainly a lot of money, it isn’t even close to being “above the law.” The OP says that the service has been operating under a bunch of different names for somewhere close to a decade. Even though they certainly were not making $100k/mo from the beginning, let’s make the most generous assumptions possible and do some napkin math of the upper bound. 10 years = 120 months, so 120*100k = $12mil. And that’s the upper bound. That’s only a single order of magnitude more than what someone who bought a house in the US for about $600k a decade ago has in net worth (with the fairly realistic assumption that the value of it rose to at least $1mil), and there are tons and tons of those people.
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      > the main guy running the SWAT service makes roughly $100k/mo at most I can almost guarantee you that he wasn't the big fish/the end of the trail. His entire operation is just a proxy hop, one of many. $100k a month is an insane amount of money to me, and is more than enough to have power to buy people, lawyers, houses in countries that don't extradite or recognize the charges as crimes, and have people murdered. If you're not able to buy everyone around you with $100k every single month you're not even trying. I would assume anyway, who knows though lol buy == bribe/put in your pocket (just so it's not confused with literally buying people, which you could also do with that kind of money I'm assuming)
      - morkalork 3y ago
        It's a lot but it's not "buy yourself an American supreme court judge" levels of insane money. Anyways, those kind of criminals live in places like Russia and they don't live in a vacuum. They exist because the government and organized crime allow them to exist. Like a cute pet that pays kickbacks. I can't imagine being this flashy with I'll-gotten gains without being secure in the knowledge that everyone important has been paid off: https://www.businessinsider.com/millionaire-russian-hackers-evil-corp-car-pictures-video-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/millionaire-russian-hackers-...

filoleg 3y ago

The OP says that the issue is that the scammers live in countries to which most western merchants refuse to ship anymore due to high prevalence of scams originating there (eastern europe, russia, etc.) and near zero ability to enforce the law against them by the US authorities. For all we know, those items sent to US-located “drops” (aka unaware victims and accessories to the crime) for shipping overseas were indeed bought with gift cards. That’s beside the point, the problems that those SWAT services are supposed address are explicitly related to shipping items (which were purchased with stolen credit cards, either directly or by using gift cards) to countries where most western merchants refuse to ship in the first place. Gift cards won’t even be needed here, since the only person who can get pinned for this is the US-based “drop” who was unknowingly helping out the criminals.

wutwutwat 3y ago
It's physical onion routing/proxying to obscure the true origin of the scams and spread it over such a wide area (the world), or such a powerful and wealthy area (U.S.) that cutting off business in those regions is impossible because you'd put yourself out of business in doing so. The exit nodes, or true origins are the pockets of the folks running the whole scheme. Good luck finding them, and even if they are found, they are insanely wealthy, so nothing will come of it, because that's how the world works.
- filoleg 3y ago
  > they are insanely wealthy The OP mentions that the main guy running the SWAT service makes roughly $100k/mo at most. While it is certainly a lot of money, it isn’t even close to being “above the law.” The OP says that the service has been operating under a bunch of different names for somewhere close to a decade. Even though they certainly were not making $100k/mo from the beginning, let’s make the most generous assumptions possible and do some napkin math of the upper bound. 10 years = 120 months, so 120*100k = $12mil. And that’s the upper bound. That’s only a single order of magnitude more than what someone who bought a house in the US for about $600k a decade ago has in net worth (with the fairly realistic assumption that the value of it rose to at least $1mil), and there are tons and tons of those people.
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    > the main guy running the SWAT service makes roughly $100k/mo at most I can almost guarantee you that he wasn't the big fish/the end of the trail. His entire operation is just a proxy hop, one of many. $100k a month is an insane amount of money to me, and is more than enough to have power to buy people, lawyers, houses in countries that don't extradite or recognize the charges as crimes, and have people murdered. If you're not able to buy everyone around you with $100k every single month you're not even trying. I would assume anyway, who knows though lol buy == bribe/put in your pocket (just so it's not confused with literally buying people, which you could also do with that kind of money I'm assuming)
    - morkalork 3y ago
      It's a lot but it's not "buy yourself an American supreme court judge" levels of insane money. Anyways, those kind of criminals live in places like Russia and they don't live in a vacuum. They exist because the government and organized crime allow them to exist. Like a cute pet that pays kickbacks. I can't imagine being this flashy with I'll-gotten gains without being secure in the knowledge that everyone important has been paid off: https://www.businessinsider.com/millionaire-russian-hackers-evil-corp-car-pictures-video-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/millionaire-russian-hackers-...