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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I wouldn't say unintentionally it is brought up every time I've seen them discussed. It seems pretty wilful. They always claim they are ok because Amazon has really good fraud detection and wish list purchases with fraudulent credit cards aren't held against the user with the wish list.

To me that sounds like a) holding your hands over your eyes to ignore the fraud and b) like a disaster waiting to happen for anyone that uses the site regularly and ends up with a few fraudulent purchases sent to them.

Imagine regularly having goods shipped to your house from stolen/fraudulent credit cards. I see someone having the police show up at their door due to this site by the end of the year.

This is inherent in BTC. How can you have anonymous transactions and still avoid fraud?

This isn't BTC fraud, it's CC fraud with a traceable shipping address.

The recipient associated with the shipping address hasn't committed any fraud though.

Best case scenario they get the stolen property taken off them and they are out the bitcoins. Worst case how do they prove they weren't the buyer?

It's not stolen property though, it's property purchased with (presumably) fraudulent credit card details. They can prove they're not the buyer, because the buyer has a completely different name.

It's property that has been sent without payment received. It's stolen.

>They can prove they're not the buyer, because the buyer has a completely different name.

It doesn't matter the fraudulently purchased goods were shipped to your house. You are in possession of them and you're the person most likely to have committed the credit card fraud. Either way you are out the property even if you don't get investigated for credit card fraud.

Do it a few times though and it will be difficult to explain away.

If it ever came to trial, there would be no proof that you'd been the one that committed the fraud. That's where the burden of proof lies, and there's simply no evidence.

There would be a lot of evidence though. The fact that on multiple occasions items purchased with stolen credit cards were sent to you and you had not returned those items implying you were expecting them.

You'd have to come up with evidence to prove it wasn't you that ordered it and good luck with that.

Your assuming that the buyer(Purchase of say electronics) is aware how the sellers get there goods, and your just assuming all items are carded.

What happens if you linked the website on Facebook and people were like "Oh crap this is cheap" and go buy buy buy. The whole 'if its to good to be true it is' isn't going to stand up in court. The prosecution will have to prove that you knew the good where fraudulently purchased. Who know some people may use this as a legit alternative to Amazon, thinking all the items are legit (which they may well be).

I'm not assuming they are all carded. I'm assuming most will be. The discounts asked for on the site make it stupid for people to buy bitcoin with it with legitimate cards.

Then they'd likely end up with a bunch of carded stuff too.

As I said before best case situation you have to return everything you were sent and you lose your bitcoins in the process. Worse case you get an overzealous prosecutor that goes after you and tries to make the case that the number of carded things showing up at your address and claimed by you proves you were the one doing the carding. Would they win? Who knows but it'd certainly cost you more than you'd ever save to win yourself and you'd still lose the products in the short term.

No they would have to prove that you did. Now they would have an IP address of the purchaser and that's not going to be you. They could also forensicly examine your computer and find out that you have no proxy tools, or tools that may be used to commit online fraud. Then what, where do they go from there?

Nowhere but by that point you will have had your computers confiscated for the investigation(have you ever seen the condition of stuff they return?) and almost certainly had to hire a lawyer. So you're down your hardware, money for a lawyer, as well as losing the product you bought and the bitcoin that you paid.

I would be terrified to use PurseIO as a BTC "spender". I'm guessing that many of these orders end with cops knocking on the door of the spender, because they received merchandise purchased with a stolen credit card. I think it's an interesting idea, but I can't believe that many BTC holders are inviting this kind of scrutiny.

I agree, I wouldn't be uncomfortable using it, but it's unlikely the cops are knocking on doors to investigate minor cc fraud cases

http://purse.io

How is this different from the "gift card network" that I can use to indirectly pay for a VPN? When I saw that I screamed "money laundering!"

Why does the location of the product matter? The crime is the fraudulent credit card use, which is well documented by Amazon, not receiving the camera.

Oh, you mean because there is no evidence pointing to the physical location or identity of the carded.

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