Hacker News Reader

Comment by blumkvist | Hacker News Reader

>Do companies like Brainstorm Elite ever pay the price for wholesale fraud and the theft of brand identities?

Yes, they do. The FTC takes them for every penny they got. At least the big ones.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...

Whereupon their creators it seems walk away and start the next dodgy company. Glancing at the Atlantic article "Jesse Willms is doing just fine financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it" and is advertising "just $1 for a vehicle-history report" and then billing $199 to peoples credit cards. Methinks the laws could be tightened a tad.

Internet sarcasm fail. I'm sorry.

That's a great article, thanks for linking to it.

I missed the original submission and discussion which was here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6972139

But it won't help much, because they're all shell companies intended to be cheap to dispose of whenever the backlash strikes - and before that happens, they will already have whisked any proceeds away.

payment processing companies should be partially (fully?) responsible for this kind of scams.

this seems to be reasonable force to make them find ways of filtering rouge clients.

some of payment processing companies will freeze incoming payments up to 6 months for high risk clients for example. that's a good start.

Payment processing companies (of the traditional variety; I'm not sure about the newbies like Stripe) also require a list of the company's principals with their social security numbers when you open a merchant account. The purpose of that is to add those individuals to TMF/MATCH if the account is closed for some kind of abuse, like excessive fraud. Other banks check those lists before opening a new payment processing account, which theoretically stops you from using shell companies to perpetuate credit card fraud after termination.

Unless he runs out of dog groomers to front his shell companies, I don't see it solving anything.

But I don't see why he can't be criminally prosecuted, at this point jailing him seems to be the only way to stop him.

What a POS that kid is. He has the skills and ability to create a legitimate company, but decides to take the easy path (at least in the short term).

Wow, i am blown away by how dark internet commerce's gray zone can get. thanks for sharing this article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com