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What I've seen happening is people buying ebooks with stolen credit card numbers. Presumably, the criminal had published ebooks just for this purpose.

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Possibly. For small value transactions there's also a lot of people doing tests to see if a card is still live before using it for real purchases. When I was at Yahoo more than a decade ago, we ran into a lot of attempts to purchase extra storage for e-mail (pre-Gmail days...) with stolen cards for that purpose.

I’ve always wondered the point of this. I had a card stolen (skimmed in a taxi) and the first thing they did was donate $1 to a charity, before buying $12k of aquarium equipment from another country. Why not start with the aquarium purchase? (side note, the bank didn’t chargeback the donation because it would have cost the charity, and I wasn’t going to challenge that).

Maybe there is risk in putting in a big order (requires contact details? Requires actual contact? There is cost to setting up an account).

This way, you don't risk / burn an account without getting your payoff.

Criminal A skims your card and sells a bundle of cards to criminal B as unvalidated.

Criminal B runs the cards through a donation engine to validate them, and sells to criminal C for more per card.

Criminal C buys one validated card to make an order for aquarium equipment.

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