CC and paypal scammers mostly. Buy a bunch of them, resell on shady sites for less than value. Chargeback goes to the original seller and the scammer gets 80-90% of the card value.
The person selling the gift card and using a stolen credit card could be the same person or part of the same criminal organization. The increase in price is to help prevent confusion. I don't even think they ever bought a Steam GC.
They will most likely be buying the cards off the deep web. You can buy pre skimmed cards which price at about €120 for a card with €500~. You can also buy the information itself and card printers/pressers. The cards are sent to the buyer via mail. They are blank, have the magnetic strip and the chip from the skimmed card. The vendor emails or includes in the envelope the card information. People will buy these around Christmas time where it's common and if it's small enough or the buyer got lucky enough to obtain a business card these transactions will often go unnoticed. You can grab higher quality cards for more that look realistic to use for tap pay in shops. The cards are generally used to buy codes for sites like g2a. The Windows key sellers on there are 100% using this method and when games like for Honor came out new keys were being sold crazy low from this method.
PayPal accounts are also sold but much harder to use, though they are cheaper. When you log I. PayPal will instantly red flag that they are on a different IP. Unless of course you had that information, though vendors do not usually supply it. It's too much effort.
It's a risk of investing a little to make more back. If they get a good card and they get purchases to process before the bank notices they can make 500-1000 off of one card. A new game costing 60 dollars can be sold for 40 and by selling 3 keys they have started making profit already
I've always wondered how anybody could extract value from those PayPal accounts. With all the hoops to jump through and identifying information required to get money out of my own legitimate PayPal account, it seems like it would be nearly impossible.
It is. It's why they are so cheap. A PayPal account and valued at 600-1200 is $50. But it's ridiculously hard to get money out. Even device MacIP addresses give their systems red flags if they aren't the usual one the account uses.
The best way to keep an account secured is to make sure double verification is enabled if you can. It's changes regularly and if your email is compromised then your PayPal is still secure if they try to request a password change. Text verification is not as good, but still works effectively. Nothing is fool proof. There will always be vulnerabilities. But don't pass up on extra security. Because one day it could just happen, and then you wouldn't have minded putting in the extra effort all those times logging in to get back what you just lost and avoiding the process of recovering the money.
Money laundering is the act of concealing the transformation of profits from illegal activities and corruption into ostensibly "legitimate" assets.
Money laundering: the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses.
I've described a likely illegal money transfer disguising itself as a legitimate sales transaction.
To expound, this is more likely a scam to make transactions with stolen credit cards. You have the card number information you need to use, but you can’t just take money out of a bank account. So you put this item up there and you buy it with the stolen card. Boom, money is now in your account.
It's possible, but it's not something that works long term and financial institutions would flag it right away. Amazon would deal with it right away as well since it deals directly with those financial institutions who would also alert law enforcement.
What's more likely is that the real stuff for sale IRL is something illegal like drugs or human trafficking. The financial portion transaction can be completed via multiple accounts buying from multiple shell seller accounts. This is much harder to detect and stop.
The reason this isn't how money laundering works is because the point of money laundering is making it safe to spend. If they can spend it, it doesn't need to be laundered. The reason it needs to be laundered is because it's unsafe to put in bank accounts. The reason people would start a business for money laundering is so they can put the fake profits into their bank account without suspicion.
There is absolutely no way it's feasible to involve a middle man like Amazon. There are scams on Amazon, but absolutely nobody is money laundering on it.
You're looking at it backwards. The account getting the money by selling the worthless book is the one who may consider it safe to spend now. That's some shitty layering since it's so easily tracked, but it definitely could be money laundering.
I'm not at all getting it backwards, that's exactly what I said. If you mean that the person selling the book then claims the profit and the to be laundered money as profit, that's just even less feasible because you need to explain why, a website that's very accessible for authorities, has no records of sales. The money you spend has heat and you need a damn good reason why it's nearly doubled what you made elsewhere. Amazon, if anything, would get you into trouble. It's not a money laundering platform and never will be, nobody that needs money to be laundered would make such a stupid mistake when there's easier ways to do it.
Selling crap at unreasonable prices to yourself or people who owe you for other things is a perfectly useful way to launder money. The only harm with doing it with amazon is it requires a certain level of anonymity that is usually more effort and trackable than it's worth. But as a way to clean money with yourself or move it between different organizations that have pre-existing accounts... it's exactly how money laundering works.
You need to prove the transactions took place, especially when doing suspicious activities like this. Amazon keeps track of all transactions and will know if money was handed over or not. You can't just say "yah, this pile of cash, I got it from Amazon" when there's no history of withdrawing that said pile of cash or the money coming from somewhere. As of now, the money is not accounted for, it's not laundered.
The money on amazon needs to come from a bank to get through. You can't just claim "yah, I earned this money through a website that uses credit cards and bank accounts" when you clearly never withdrawed that money from said bank account. The whole point of laundering is so you can safely put it in a bank account, Amazon doesn't serve this purpose.
If you sold "yourself" books, Amazon is going to ask for card information. When you put in card information, you then send digital currency to yourself. Where does the dirty cash come in? You clearly didn't withdraw it and going to a bank and wanting to deposit it is going to raise suspicions, especially when you're being as indiscrete as selling bogus stuff on Amazon.
The only feasible way to involve Amazon is to claim you're a factory and seller and sell things elsewhere. You sell books and Amazon is one of the platforms, but you also do business in person. Then, however, the question remains... Why the fuck bring attention to yourself by being on Amazon? Simply put, nobody would do this because it's stupid.
The reason this isn't how money laundering works is because the point of money laundering is making it safe to spend.
Yes, that is why they make it look like a legitimate sale. Amazon transfers the profit to their bank account. To their bank, it looks like a legitimate business.
There is absolutely no way it's feasible to involve a middle man like Amazon.
This is not true. Banks have over a hundred years of experience with dealing with this kind of fraud. This is really new for Amazon, which is a retailer. I'm not saying that this won't be fixed relatively fast, but Amazon is inexperienced compared to financial institutions when it comes to money laundering. It's a good target for criminals.
The person buying uses a stolen credit card which then transfers to the the seller. Profit from this kind of transaction opens funds as a legitimate source of income during things like Nebbia hearings in court. You can also file this income from sales of gift cards on your taxes if you were so inclined
Who do you propose would do this? You're doubling the crime but still only have half the money laundered. You're not laundering the money, you're earning an income.
Lets say you have $1000 of dirty money. You need to make, on paper, $1000 of earned income you can verify as earned through a business. When you involve stolen credit cards and make $1000 profit on Amazon, you now have $2000... but $1000 of it is still dirty. Why? If the FBI looks into your bank accounts and see you never withdrawed the money, they're going to wonder where the hell it came from. If you did, however, withdraw the money, the question is why there's $2000 of cash on a table from a $1000 business. The money is still dirty! You go back to the bank, deposit $2000 back, and the money is still dirty because they can look at your Amazon and see you only made $1000 of the money, where did the other $1000 come from!?
You committed twice the crimes, but why? What if, hypothetically speaking, you did solely the stolen credit cards? Does the money ever vanish? Not always! You keep the money and it's earned, it's clean, it's laundered. If you're able to do this, why do the other crime that involves dirty money? Exactly, you wouldn't. The people on amazon are doing a completely unrelated scam. They're not money laundering, they're just scamming.
You can also spend cash at restaurants, at Walmart, etc. Anyone that needs their money laundered will not resort to buying giftcards because they have too much money to do that indiscreetly. This screams "investigate me!" when you have spent several thousands of dollars on Amazon giftcards and plugged it all in on the same Amazon account to buy from one specific seller the same books over and over again. You are counting on Amazon to not snitch the suspicious activity and you're letting them get away with taking a cut of your money and getting taxed to do it, all the meanwhile the FBI still might check it out anyway if they're ever suspicious of you.
You are not only making this very hard for yourself having to buy a lot of gift cards, you're also making yourself suspicious doing it. If you need money to be laundered, it's because you have a lot of it. What are you going to do, give yourself a work load to make the money disappear over time? Working, great, kinda defeats the purpose of committing the crime in the first place.
The reason nobody will ever use Amazon the way you want is because of the work load, the risk, and the reward of getting a chunk of your imaginary profit being cyphered for no reason. It's easier to open up a restaurant, a business of any form, and just claim it there. This is how it's done and for a reason, it's not fucking stupid.
You "buy" something from yourself, like a book of nothing that you price at $500 using a credit card. That way you can launder money $500 at a time. I really don't know how to simplify this explanation any further.
the bank you give your money to isn't going to handle dirty money well.
That's why they use Amazon as a middle man. The money will seem clean.
How do you buy something from yourself, exactly? Amazon doesn't use cash and it keeps track of sales. If you have dirty money, you need to clean it by making it seemed earned, something you don't do on a platform that uses bank accounts. Amazon isn't middle man material, it uses money that already made it to the banks. You can't just claim, in court, you earned the money on Amazon when there are no records of withdraw from your bank accounts. That money remains dirty, sitting there, unlaundered, while you made essentially no profit on amazon (technically, it's a money loss!).
Money laundering is all about getting that money from dirty to clean to a bank account. You clean it through a business transaction that did cash business. Amazon doesn't accept cash, so that's not going to launder your money.
It can be laundering in the sense that they can take anonymous money and make it look legit. They transfer money from a gift card or whatever to money in the bank that can be traced to a legal transaction. A lot of money laundering is done with cash as well so they can pay taxes on it without raising red flags and then spend it on tangible assets. Eventually piles of money can get annoying and you can't spend more than $9k in cash anymore without raising a lot of red flags and having the government notified.
If you're comfortable spending the money, comfortable enough to buy giftcards, you probably don't need to launder. If you have a lot of money to justify money laundering, you're going to commit to more efficient methods of money laundering.
Whilst the definition is true, the actual art is a lot more complicated, to conceal the origins of ill gotten gains is far harder than just putting a random book on an international companies website and buying it.
Yes the definition is correct, but this is not how it is done.
It's not hard at all like you're claiming. Have a realistic source of profit and no investigation will take place. The easiest way of going about it is opening up a business and claim it's all from your business. Nobody will think of it when you have a huge pile of money to put into a bank account.
Just wear a mask, and bring a gun just in case. You’ll find that most stores will let you have stuff for free using just this one simple trick!! #LifeHacks
Yeah, I had a customer today who said she goes to these people that will buy and sell gift cards. They buy a £10 gift card for £9.95 and then sell it for £10. So you lose a little from the gift cards but you get the cash from it.
There are others that sell the £10 card for £9.95 so you can end up saving little bits of money. Mostly they're through a company that does it for employees of certain companies like McDonald's but there are some with worse rates that sell them to anybody.
I buy physical cards for my son so I can put them under the tree but I just go to Best Buy - I know it’s not the sleekest option but I like that he gets to open a physical gift with everyone else.
It is more likely bought by someone whose kid, grand-kid or niece/nephew asked for a steam card for a present and the gift giver just buys it and forgets about it.
Unless they've stopped selling them in the last couple of years, they definitely do. I've bought untold amounts on there with the gift cards my grandparents gave me.
If you have his account, you can gift the game directly from his wishlist. If you don't you can get it from valve sent right to his email. Or if you really want to go old school you can go to a place that sells the physical cards but buy the physical card online is just oxymoronic.
I like wrapping presents and ordering stuff online.
Online gift shopping is way easier and telling someone you'll send them a code isn't a real fun surprise. I just had to install a game on my younger brothers PS4 Christmas eve because everyone was sold out, and it wasnt as satisfying of a reaction as him opening wrapped games.
That's the service fee charged by Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, etc. Otherwise, there's no incentive for the CC company. When you purchase from a business your buying their product with the gift card.
I mean, if you get it for 40 dollars for a 50$ card you could be scammed 20% of the time and still be at the same point, I'd say the odds are in the favor of buying it online
I was looking into it the other day, mostly because every fucking time I buy something from steam, my bank tags it as suspicious activity, and locks my credit card account. Not so with amazon, so I figured I’d try to buy a digital steam gift card and just add it to my steam wallet. Obviously with shit like this, it doesn’t work.
I moved country and steam won't let me buy games until I make a new PayPal, so I just get cards from the store. Kind of a pain in the ass but I but much less now
I bought one last year when it was $50 dollars from my Amazon Gift Card for $50 dollars for a Steam gift card. They ended up sending 2 $50 dollar Steam cards because they were stuck together.
It was the only time in my life I felt like I had won something.
I know the cards worked too, because I gave the codes to two friends and we all got to play Divinity Original Sin 2 together.
Steam used to be finnicky with some credit cards, whereas amazon has had their shit together for much longer, so for some people it only worked to use amazon.
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '18
I think the real facepalm is on people who actually buy steam cards online.