That is another story about the FTC action against less than 10% of the Devbil Organized Crime Syndicate: »
Ebook websites, fraud charges, Devbill/DigitalAge/Plutosaid by nytimes.com :
..... The suit, filed in March by the Federal Trade Commission, contends that over at least four years, scammers placed more than $10 million in bogus charges on consumers’ credit and debit cards. Then, the suit says, they moved the money to bank accounts in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Kyrgyzstan. The suit was filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois....
In four years the total cost is north of $250 Million ($.25 billion), the fraud has operated unfettered for 10 years, since at least 2000.
said by nytimes.com :
The scammers evaded detection by keeping each charge under $10 and stealing from each cardholder only once, spreading the theft across more than a million cardholders, the suit says.
Totally wrong, they hit cards repeatedly, but there could be one two or even three months in between. No one has looked at the big picture. A victim who never noticed, had 19 charges over a 2 year period.
said by nytimes.com :
“No one has appeared to defend the companies,” said Steven M. Wernikoff, a trade commission staff lawyer overseeing the case.
Really, Seriously ?? you were expecting them to show up?
said by nytimes.com :
When the commission filed a motion to seize the United States assets of the companies, less than $100,000 was recovered. It hopes to recover sums transferred abroad, but Mr. Wernikoff says that “it’s going to take some time.”
Not a chance for recovery, after they switched from using Inowest, Midtown, etc, all divisions of Fethard Finance aka fethard.biz aka ChronoPay, all the funds are withdrawn in cash on the same day that it arrives by OCS local mules. Tested on numerous occasions at various bank drops over the years. Money is taken within hours, very coordinated, even tried a sting set up to get some wired back:»
Re: Ebook websites, fraud charges, Devbill/DigitalAge/Pluto In one bank drop for wires in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, bank confirmed the business wire drop account which was opened by a local Taxi Driver was cleaned out in cash after each inbound wire from the US. When that particular wiring drop was rolled, the said taxi driver account holder disappeared and cannot be found anywhere since. Somehow I doubt he voluntarily went on an extended vacation.
Pavel Vrublevsky, CEO of ChronoPay, knows where many $$ millions of the card fraud laundering proceeds went to after arriving at Inowest, Midtown, etc. They were used for well over two years as the central and sole laundering conduit of the OCS. I asked Pavel many times to tell me where the card fraud proceeds money went to after it arrived at Fethard's sub companies. Pavel promised to get the data from his Russian offices on multiple occasions and give me the information. Despite the promises he never turned over any information. He is one person who knows where $$$ millions of the card fraud laundering proceeds went to during 2005 to 2008, after it arrived in eastern European and central Asian bank accounts under Fethard's aka fethard.biz control.
said by nytimes.com :
Most of the fraudulent charges that appeared on victims’ statements were for $9, but at different times, charges of just 20 cents were favored, Mr. Wernikoff said. Maybe the scammers should have stuck with $9: “There were more complaints about the 20-cent charges because they looked really odd,” he said.
The FTC and the Boston Times article "Mysterious credit card charge may have hit millions of users" »
www.boston.com/business/ ··· f_users/ mis diagnosed and got it wrong. The GFDL and other accounts which were set by the OCS to ping and validate cards. The $.17 to $.27 amounts were not intended as fraud charges per se, the OCS was forced to hit them with tiny amounts to cover the processing of "Ping tests". prior to this the OCS used to hack into small business merchant accounts, many were PayPal, and over a weekend would run many thousands of "pre authorizations" against card databases in order to validate the card data before running them through their own fraud laundering accounts for the $10.
The small business hacked accounts would get a bill for several thousand $$ for the pre auth, a pre auth costs ~ $.15 to $.30. For years that was the ideal method since pre auths roll off the card after 24 to 48 hours. Victims would never know the card was tested unless the checked online and saw the pre auth & pending. It took a while but processors eventually caught on and all merchant accounts now have an auto pre auth limit. If the systems detects pre auths coming in from any merchant account, it will block pre auths after 20 0r 30 sequential submits, the account will have to then be manually reset after a call is made to a merchant. That change killed the OCS multi year tactic of hacking into vendor accounts. For years Authorize.net only required an Account ID, not even a password to submit pre auths.
The millions of card accounts hit with the .17 to .25 charges were actually pings to test the card, an amount about equal to the cost of the processing. They were not intended to be revenue generating. As like several other events over the years where the OCS screws up using a dumb tactic, it made national media headlines. However the FTC and other media have mistakenly identified this as a tiny intentional revenue generating charge, it was not. They were validating cards, using the only way left to do it.
said by nytimes.com :
The scheme depended upon the scammers persuading banks that they had a legitimate business so that they could secure merchant accounts through which the credit card charges were routed, the suit says; false storefronts were set up on the Web, pretending to sell electronics or office supplies, in case a bank investigated.
Absolutely no persuasion is necessary, merchant accounts are commodity items. Every one of the many hundreds of accounts that I have examined had at least one, if not multiple glaring paperwork inconsistencies. An analogy Like a Jane Smith from Boston applying for an Auto Loan, and submitting a title of a vehicle registered to a Tom Doeman in Texas, and getting approved.
said by nytimes.com :
“One thing that the banks can do a better job at is vetting merchants much more carefully,” said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Research. “That’s been a weak spot for many years.”
How about just "vetting", minimally even... How about just even once detecting $40,000 a month being wired to high risk countries from a business account, where 100% of those proceeds came from a merchant account where 30% of the charges were against the bank's own customers. An activity that is a bulls eye for mandated SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) and FINCEN filings.
said by nytimes.com :
Wells Fargo deserves credit for checking merchant references that helped uncover the problem. The perpetrators used stolen identities, with names, Social Security numbers and addresses of seemingly random individuals, the suit says.
Daniel Fuchs, a deputy attorney general in California, was surprised to receive a call one day from Wells Fargo about a merchant account application filed in his name. (When you steal identities, it might be best to stay away from the staff at the attorney general’s office.)
Kudos goes to Wells Fargo !!
said by nytimes.com :
By law, consumers are liable for no more than $50 in fraudulent charges on a credit card ...
ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE !! Consumers are liable for $0 by law in these cases. Consumers are only liable for the first $50 if their CREDIT CARD is STOLEN and is used before they have not reported it. In these cases consumer's CARDS are NOT STOLEN they still have them. THEIR CARD DATA IS STOLEN.
said by nytimes.com :
If a credit card is physically swiped in the transaction, the bank that issued the card is on the hook for fraudulent charges. If it is a phone or Internet purchase — called a card-not-present transaction — the bank that hosted the merchant account that received the ill-gotten charges must make restitution, said Ms. Litan, the Gartner analyst.
That means the bank that issues credit cards has little motivation to be greatly concerned about online fraud. Lisa B. Westermann, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, said that her bank used numerous measures to prevent fraud but could not discuss them because “doing so might compromise our ability to prevent/stop fraud.”
Well it is not exactly like any bank is doing a roaring great job at catching this 10 year fraud operation.
said by nytimes.com :
In the government’s narrative of events, the scammers in the Illinois case shrewdly understood how little information was provided to cardholders on their statements. A one-time mystery charge of $9 would be met with a shrug, about a million times.
A shrug, maybe for a significant number, I guess you do not read the multiple complaint boards much, many thousands of victims do complain.
said by nytimes.com :
... Micro fraud, macro returns.
Returns !!! Surely you Jest .... it has never gone away in ten years....it has never even taken a vacation.... pay attention !!.
MGD
