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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

Great, all it takes in Canada to ruin someone’s life is to know their name and address, and a stolen card!

I’m still missing one part, if that woman has her account hacked (plus the credit card, isn’t it supposed to be encrypted in walmart site?), and that scammer sent the goods to the guy, how did the scammer know that the guy ordered the stuff in the first place?! The coordinated attack is a little too sophisticated for a stolen credit card, because that would assume the scammer is also hacking that guy amazon account? Unless the seller is the scammer or part of a scammer ring and whenever he placed that order, they used the woman card to make the purchases, but why bother, they could’ve just used that card somewhere else, harder to track and a higher outcome? something isn’t adding up.

That being said, I always use virtual cards for anything online, and those are a “prepaid credit cards”.

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> how did the scammer know that the guy ordered the stuff in the first place?!

The idea is the scammer is the seller on Amazon. So the guy orders from Amazon Marketplace, the Marketplace seller uses a hacked Wal-Mart account to fulfill the order and pockets the cash from Amazon.

What’s the point or the advantage of doing so? The card will be cancelled right after and instead of using the max amount of that card, now you are only limited with what left after purchasing that goods, from the scammer perspective, I don’t see how’s this any better than maxing the card somewhere online instead, unless I’m missing something.

I think the idea is that the scammer gets a legitimate payment from the receiver, and charges a bad payment to the sender. The sender cancels their card, and reverses the charge, so now Walmart is out the money and out the item. But the receiver card is not cancelled because they actually intended to use it, and received the goods that they ordered, so Amazon pays out to them for fulfilling the order.

The problem with maxing out the stolen card is that you can't get cash -- you can get stuff, but even then, you have to give away your address.

Very interesting! I think the next step for that guy is to go after amazon for enabling the scam and being the front-end.

Another interesting twist of this happened to me. Someone created two eBay accounts. One in my name, one as a seller. They used my card to pay the seller with my forged eBay account.

Then they found the tracking number of a package sent to my city around the same time.

Ultimately the charge back failed when I reported fraud. They had a tracking number and invoice in my name, which my bank and eBay said had to be me. When I asked eBay to refund, they said the opposite as what they said to my bank. They said only the creator of the account could refund, not the person named on the account, so I could only refund if I found the fraudster and got their consent.

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