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Comment by arzel | Hacker News Reader

Probably some group checking to see if their stolen credit cards are working, by ordering pizza to this guys address.

He said his friend also gets a lot of these deliveries, sometimes on the same day he does. He suspects it's someone they know.

It's been happening for 9 years and yet none of these businesses have managed to put him on a blacklist?

I smell something fishy. The article started to read like The Onion at one point, and I suspect it's not even real.

Maybe the shops are laundering money, and pretend they are loosing money with their "victims", while actually registering a sale to allow dirty money to come in.

This solves the problem you get when laundering money with a food joint: you need customers.

Why would they not just randomize the addresses? Or just deliver to an office where they could claim 100€+ deliveries?

I don't know, the restaurants I suspect of laundering money around me don't bother faking customers. They are just empty most of the time.

Maybe they noticed that those adresses never cause problems (single old people) and are close enough to not be too annoying to deliver to?

Maybe they are just too lazy to do more, and it's enough for it to work?

Maybe they are using a lot more addresses but we don't get that information? But there is a limit to the addresses you can use, and you are supposed to have repeated customers.

Maybe there is something special about those adresses we don't know about?

I’m wondering how this works actually. Are they actually delivering pizzas or are those pizzas with expired ingredients or just fake boxes? I guess the latter doesn’t make sense since you’d notice more registered sales than what your raw materials are able to yield.

I'd assume eat and share what you can, and just waste the ingredients when you can't.

When you launder money, you loose some of it. It can't be helped. And criminal probably don't care about not being green.

No, under the assumption the pizza business is laundering money, they are real pizzas. Key to business laundering money to appear real to audits, surveillance, etc.

Reason to give away pizzas would be to cutdown on marketing costs, since then you’re only filter for a “customer” is people that take random free stuff.

Similar but different setup is a fake lottery, where the winner was is preselected to win and the tickets are given away free to the public who have no chance of winning but provide there information. As long as the method of controlling the winner remains secret, it would be hard after the fact to prove the “randomly” selected winner was not random; clearly people do get caught and there are ways to detect people are doing this.

One last example would be a dry cleaning service, where they offer limited amount of to good to be true offers, then stock the rest of the clothes being “laundered” via cheap used clothes purchased at second hand stores.

A lot of these patterns show up in due diligence for business acquisition, especially mom & pop lines of business.

Money laundering is often used as an explanation for seemingly bad business, but often it doesn't make any sense. Why would you send a pizza to a person who didn't order it and who will not pay? You can make fake orders without actually delivering any pizza. Actually producing and delivering the pizza is only expense and will increase the risk of attracting attention for specious orders (as in this article). If you really need to deliver an actual pizza for some reason, why not to a friend or relative rather than a random person?

I agree. I'm just speculating for fun here.

maybe they just drive there with an empty pizza box and say here's your pizza. It would suck if one time after years and years of saying no thanks, if he said "you know what, I would like a pizza. yes" and then tried to pay.

What would be the purpose?

The point of laundering money is to hide the origin of the money, and the way to do that is to exchange it for clean money.

You can launder money with a business: you pay vendors and employees with the dirty money. But then your receipts are the clean money.

That means you need real customers giving you money. So you do need to run an actual business.

(There are other ways to launder money, usually that involve spreading it around between various accounts so it becomes hard to track. But those don't require anything as elaborate as actually hiring employees, just a fake storefront so you can get a merchant account and some paperwork done.)

I always assumed the point of laundering money is that dirty money becomes clean once the government has a legitimate source for it. There is after all nothing technically different between clean and dirty money, it's the same bills.

So a business that is cash based claims $5 million in income from sales to customers. The business pays taxes on that $5 million. That $5 million in fact came from selling illegal drugs for cash. However, to the government the money is now clean as it originates from a legitimate source. The owner of the business can then send the profit to whatever place he wants with no worry. No real customers are needed.

edit: More specifically, a drug dealer cannot just deposit $5 million in cash into Wells Fargo without police intervention, a cash based business can.

I presume it's about making the income appear to be plausible to a tax inspector.

If you actually sell illegal drugs as a business, but claim to have a pizza place on your tax returns, the government might inspect you someday. If they find that you don't have any big pizza ovens, routine large orders for ingredients, staff of delivery drivers, piles of receipts from customers, etc, then they'll probably get suspicious very fast.

If you do make and deliver at least some pizzas on a appropriate scale, then things get a lot harder. They'd have to run down all of your customers and ask them if they ordered and received pizza, check if the dough order receipts are real and match the expected volume, are the delivery drivers real and how much work do they do, etc. Much more work to run down, and who has time for that? You could probably get away with it, for a while at least, as long as you didn't screw something else up.

Using the money to "pay vendors and employees" does not hide the source of the money. Laundering typically involves inflating reported income so that you can slip the dirty money into your income stream. If you run a pizza business, you sell one pizza for $10, but in your receipts you claim you sold two pizzas for $20. Now you've laundered $10; it's hard for the government to prove that you didn't sell two pizzas that day, and the income will seem legit.

It's about 20 km from where I live and featured in local news both a few years and a few months ago. So I would tend to believe it, although I understand the sentiment based on this article. That firms continue to deliver there is certainly strange although one story mentioned the delivering parties are coming from further and further away. The orders are getting larger too so probably the pizzerias are fooled by the too good to be true orders. I guess it's taunting and must be haunting for the man involved. He mentioned having a scare every time a scooter passes as night now. It should be quite trivial for police to solve considering most taunters won't do much opsec.

Why would the delivery companies keep being a part of this? That doesn't make sense to me.

In belgium you only have uber eats and similar services in the big cities. Outside of those major cities pizza places do direct delivery, without a delivery intermediary.

But what about the five or six years or so before Uber Eats?

I suspect it's likely what he thinks it is: targeted harassment by someone he used to know or came in contact with in some way. This kind of thing happens a lot. I used to encounter this sort of thing myself, when some people online decided to try to harass me this way.

As long as there exist services that'll let you deliver something to someone by filling out a form online, with an option to request payment upon delivery, this kind of thing will always be possible.

Doing it for years does seem pretty crazy, though. If it is harassment, the harasser may be mentally ill.

That doesn't explain why the pizza shops would continue to go along with this for years, not getting paid each time it happens. They would blacklist that address. Pizza shops blacklist addresses and phone numbers all the time.

Hell, I think half the reason this particular form of harassment is popular is because the target is often rendered unable to order pizza themselves, after getting blacklisted by every pizza shop in town.

It's unstated in the article, but it does say "orders of pizzas, kebabs, pittas and other food that he never ordered kept flowing in", which could mean it's a lot of different places delivering to him.

If the harasser is smart, they'd vary the restaurants and use a burst of different ones at a time in sequence, with long time gaps per restaurant.

And if the delivery driver isn't reporting it to the restaurants every time, the delivery person doesn't necessarily have a high chance of reporting it, so I see how it could continue for a while if there are a lot of restaurants in his delivery range. (Assuming it really is harassment, that is.)

Reply All did a show about this https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hgd2

Love that episode. Every time I order from Dominoes I use the name Adam Pisces now

Dang - that was really good, but at the end I feel unsatisfied because it doesn't feel like they found the right answer!

One theory they never covered in the show was that it could be a hedge fund doing this to generate receipts so they can analyze sales velocity. That's part of how the Luckin Coffee fraud was uncovered.

If that's true, why would they use the same address that often? isn't it the best way to be flagged and uncovered? it would be so easy to pick random addresses

I looked up Google Maps and zip code for Turnhout where the house in the article is is 2300. So the address must be like [number] [street] 2300(Turnhout), Antwerp, Belgium.

I don’t know why it’s not Albania or Andorra but makes sense it’s not Zambia.

It's assuming the police will do anything about it.

But the probability they even take the time to listen to the old man story is pretty slim.

He said the restaurants are losing money because he does not pay them.

Someone is paying them. Why continue delivering orders to someone who you think ordered, but then isn't paying?

What you’re saying makes sense but it contradicts what is written in the article. Also, there are many many different restaurants involved in this, so any one restaurant blacklisting him would not change it.

That interpretation is fine. He says "I have always refused the deliveries, so I have never paid for anything," but that's no indicator for whether the restaurant was already paid.

because you have to pay at the door. so nobody is paying

No, the likely harasser is searching for delivery services that allow cash on delivery for payment. They just don't use any services that only have pre-payment options.

That is what I am asking, if your delivering pizzas to the same address for a decade and your not getting paid, why keep delivering pizzas? Surely you can blacklist an address or ask for payment up front? There can’t be so many pizza places in delivery range of this guys house that you can order every day for ten years and nobody catches on that this address never pays.

"Stupidity" (often in institutionalized form where the department accepting the orders and the department trying to deliver the pizza don't talk to each other and everyone sees it as not their problem) is often a perfectly sufficient answer.

but then they would already be paid, right?

Why do they keep using the same address again and again?

He says he doesn’t pay and sends them away, which implies the orders aren’t prepaid, as they would be if card testing

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