‘White Label’ Money Laundering Services

There's a Bitcoin company which I will elide naming that is, perhaps unintentionally, a carder cash out bonanza. It will continue being so until Amazon cracks down.

The gist: the site lets you buy BTC with credit cards, at a substantial markup to the market price for Bitcoin (10 to 20%). The actual mechanism is by buying wish listed items on Amazon picked by the BTC "sellers." This lets the sellers use BTC on Amazon and also get a discount. The site keeps a spread.

Why is this a carder paradise? Because the only reason to ship a random address a $300 camera for $240 of consideration is the $300 you paid is not your $300. When the chargeback/fraud investigation comes in, the carder doesn't have the stolen goods and has no IRL nexus to the crime. They just have their illicit profits laundered to BTC.

A lot of these Brian Krebs articles seem to be little more than exposés of popular services from carding forums. Of course, I don't mean to knock his investigative reporting -- he is performing a valuable public service, and some of his stories require far more complex investigative journalism than simply reading forum posts.

But I am wondering, where are all these forums that Krebs is signed up for and reading? Also, is he fluent in Russian? I know revealing the URL's might tempt would-be cyberthieves, but personally I have my own curiosity that I would like to satisfy by reading them. I suspect there is a lot to be learned just by reading those forums (which I assume are member-only and require some kind of vetting process, anyway).

> Buying luxury goods that can be resold overseas at a significant markup amplifies the fraudster’s “profit.” > where electronics and other luxury items typically sell for a much higher price than in the United States (think new iPads and iPhones, e.g.)

iPhones and iPads are indeed much more expensive in (for example) Brazil than in the U.S.:

http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Items_more_expensive_...

because the government of Brazil imposes a 50-100% luxury tax.

So I think there is validity in the article's claim that this difference amplifies the thieves' profits. However, this claim is always getting exaggerated in news reports; it's as if every stolen item gets shipped overseas because there's much more money to be made.

A variation I heard purports to explain what happens to all those stolen bicycles: the crooks ship containers full of stolen bicycles overseas where they can be sold for triple the price. If it were so much profit to be made, a legitimate business could simply buy the merchandise and export to these countries legally.

Also, in some cases, it would be very difficult to exploit the price difference whether the goods were exported legally or illegally. For example, in Singapore cars are massively more expensive than in the U.S. The government auctions off the right to put cars on the road each year. If thieves managed to get cars into Singapore, they'd still have to somehow get past a strict registration system.

> Traditionally, fraudsters get around this restriction by turning to reshipping services that rely on “mules,” people in the United States who get recruited to reship packages after responding to work-at-home job scams. These reshipping mules are sent multiple packages containing electronics that have been purchased with stolen credit and debit cards.

Is it possible to fraud the fraudster here? You sign up for the work at home job, get a bunch of high end electronics sent to you, and then just keep it (or resell it locally).