Likely using stolen credit card credentials to buy bitcoin and then use them to buy things on Steam. They already have a massive problem with that without introducing bitcoin into the equation
Also - That's just like fraud with extra steps? Why even usee btc?
What do you think a chargeback is?
I know what a chargeback is, and those are utterly irrelevant here.
On top of that, if you use a stolen credit card to buy a steam game and the original owner files a chargeback, your entire steam account gets banned. So yes it's extremely relevant here.
If instead you buy BTC on an exchange and then spend those BTC on steam, it's less likely to be flagged as fraud (at the time) because the BTC is purchased from an American website. Then you spend the BTC on steam. Then once the credit card is reported as stolen and a chargeback filed, it's the crypto exchange who gets hit. The chargeback is never associated with Steam and you can buy Steam games from a lower-priced market without the CC company ever being aware.
My credit card got into a locked state for a while every month, when Vulture did a approved monthly charge.
There are plenty of systems that verify things out of the ordinary.
It's not because you haven't encountered it, that they aren't there.
Additionally, stolen credit cards can be marked as stolen. Which would block any future payment with it.
The BTC that someone is sending you, isn't being charged back. You can't chargeback BTC. That doesn't make any sense.
> There are plenty of systems that verify things out of the ordinary.
There is no system that checks if the BTC is out of the ordinary, no.
> It's not because you haven't encountered it
Feel free to point to anywhere at all, that is doing a verification on the BTC. Not your credit card. Instead the BTC.
> stolen credit cards can be marked as stolen
A credit card can. But BTC is not a credit card.
But Crypto.com allows you to buy up to $30 worth of crypto with a credit card and cards online are pennies on the dollar online if bought in bulk.
An astute con artist would recongnise that the only real verifications credit cards have at their disposal is geolocation and shopping habits. So if one were to buy CC online, create a bot to enter the details onto the crypto.com exchange, route the traffic through a VPN using the CC address as a base, send the $30 worth of crypto you bought off exchange and into a wallet, using Tor and some clean Eth you bought in cash to pay the gas fees, Wrap the BTC in WBTC, throw it on uniswap, swap for some privacy coin, use that privacy coin to send to another wallet within that private ecosystem so the headers on the node are lost and bam. You've got some clean crypto that you've fraudulently bought with a credit card but can never be claimed as fraud!
Does anyone actually sell bitcoin via credit card transactions?
The stages are Placement, Layering, and Integration.
Here’s one source that may help explain:
https://www.stpaulschambers.com/stages-of-money-laundering-e...
2. Bitcoin is obfuscated by purchasing things online with it
3. Those online assets can be sold for cash
Also Valve will be looking for this too, as required by their bank.
This is an incredibly unrealistic money laundering scheme, entirely fabricated by mr_cyborg.
The truth is that the “fraudulent transactions” here are double-spends, because Steam was accepting 0-conf payments in an unsafe way.
Using stolen money to buy gift cards, using those gift cards to buy real things and then selling those real objects or licenses or accounts after the fact is a well known process. Substituting "bitcoin" or any cryptocurrency for "gift card" is neither unreasonable nor unrealistic.
This does not make any sense in the context of bitcoin.
2. Release some shitty game on steam that no one will play
3. Buy millions of copies of said shitty game with your illegitimate money using Bitcoin
4. Your illegitimate money is now revenue from your shitty game and can be taxed (Profit)
- You steal a credit card.
- Buy BTC with said credit card.
- Use BTC to buy Steam cosmetics that you already own and Steam converts that BTC to USD.
You now have effectively used a stolen credit card to convert its value to cold hard cash that is not traceable, or at least requires several hoops to jump through to figure out who stole the card.
If they already have their assets in BTC they could simply put them in a mixer.
But also, wouldn't it be fairly easy and beneficial to have this information? Exchanges know what wallets are charged back and fraudulent.
Is it not in their interest to work with Steam?
Or even, is it not in the exchange's interest to do this analysis and demand the coin from Steam?
1. The anti-fraud tech used for credit card fraud (ie. stolen credit cards used for unauthorized transactions) don't really translate well to the fraud described here (ie. stolen cryptocurrency).
2. it makes sense for ecommerence merchants to do anti-fraud stuff, because they're on the hook for fraud. the same does not apply to cryptocurrency transactions.
>But also, wouldn't it be fairly easy and beneficial to have this information? Exchanges know what wallets are charged back and fraudulent.
1. I haven't heard of such blacklists being around, especially in 2017 (when steam stopped accepting payments)
2. such blacklists would likely be ineffective, because of mixers and lack of coordination (see previous point)
3. such blacklists threaten the fungibility of bitcoin, which would probably cause backlash from potential customers.
>Is it not in their interest to work with Steam?
1. it might be in their interest to work with steam, but not the other way around
2. even though steam might have huge sales volume, it's not going to be the primary route criminals cash out. if you stole tens of thousands of dollars in crypto, I doubt you'll spend a significant portion of that on games. You only have so much time, and games are relatively cheap. Meanwhile localbitcoin has people willing to give you literal cash for a few percentage points cut. There's a reason why all the anti-money laundering regulations target banks and other high cash volume businesses (eg. pawn shops), and not bestbuy or mcdonalds.
>Or even, is it not in the exchange's interest to do this analysis and demand the coin from Steam?
If [random exchange] messaged me and said that some coins I hold were 10% tainted from 10 transactions ago, and wanted me to return them, I'd tell them to fuck off.
They wouldn't be blacklists. You only learn after the fact so its more about the analytics.
>I'd tell them to fuck off.
Well that's nice but if you get paid with stolen money, you don't just get to keep the money and tell them to fuck off. Steam would be liable to return the funds.
I mean, that goes back to my original question, why would they do this? Does bestbuy run analytics on the cash they receive to see how much % of their cash purchases were "fraudulent"?
>Well that's nice but if you get paid with stolen money, you don't just get to keep the money and tell them to fuck off. Steam would be liable to return the funds.
IANAL, but I thought this only applied to stolen goods, not cash? I heard of authorities seizing cash when they raid a drug house, but not randomly seizing people's cash because they happened to carry a bill that was involved in a bank robbery.
Credit card companies do, yes.
The credit card company and/or cryptocurrency exchange would eat the fraud.
>and why would they not push against the others for restitution if it's all trackable?
This is moving the goalposts. We're not discussing whether such a scheme would benefit banks/credit card companies/crypto exchanges, we're discussing whether valve implemented such a scheme for steam. I'm sure the aforementioned parties appreciate such a scheme, just as banks would appreciate a scheme where stores were checking the bills they accept were stolen or not. However, that says nothing about whether such a scheme exists, or whether steam was voluntarily doing so with no apparent benefit to itself. Nor does it change the fact that such a push was non-existent (or at least non-visible) in 2017.