Money laundering via author impersonation on Amazon?

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/money-laundering-via-author-impersonation-on-amazon

by nixtaken • 6 years ago

197 122 6 years ago

nixtaken• 6 years ago

This still seems to be happening two years later. A person complained about seeing a book sold under their name for 550 USD. It contained gibberish and the sales were recorded as income to the IRS even though the owner of the account couldn't find out where the money went. Amazon wouldn't tell her who had opened a bank account in her name. I suppose they prefer to deal with such accounts behind the scenes.

bserge2• 6 years ago

It's happening on eBay for over a decade. Cheap trinkets and books for insane prices. Except for the impersonation part, I don't understand that tbh.

rwmurrayVT2• 6 years ago

You avoid the taxes.

therealx• 6 years ago

It's not too confusing to me. It gets the IRS off the trail of the actual person getting the money - they don't care that the IRS still wants money - they are confident that it wont get traced. It's truely obfuscation.

compsciphd6• 6 years ago

notice how amazon gift cards go for higher than face value on ebay

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+c...

My only logic is that its a form of money laundering.

strogonoff2• 6 years ago

Pardon me, but how is gift card price related and how could gift cards ever be cheaper than face value (surely someone somewhere would be working at a loss)?

sammorrowdrums3• 6 years ago

The question is why wouldn't someone buy from Amazon

benmanns• 6 years ago

You can buy unlimited gift cards directly from the merchant for face value, so that sets the price ceiling. Gift cards are strictly worse than cash, and individuals with gift cards who want to sell them value them less than face value, otherwise they’d keep/spend them. The only legitimate cases I can think of are if you are spending an eBay gift card to buy one you value more, or if you somehow get extra cash back or etc to justify buying from eBay over the gift card issuer.

whoknew11223• 6 years ago

Lots of lower income areas have places (some of which are legit, most of them not) that will purchase gift cards for 50 cents on the dollar or less. The idea is that someone might gift you a giftcard to, say, Home Depot, but you need food rather than lumber. So you sell the gift card to a broker at a steep discount and pocket the money.

But this also a good way to launder money, most often for low-level drug transactions. Drug addicts steal credit cards or pass bad checks to buy gift cards. Then either give the cards to a dealer directly, or to a broker. The broker gives them cash, which they take to the dealer.

stuckindider• 6 years ago

It's a simple way to launder stolen credit cards.

Buy gift cards with a stolen credit card

Sell the gift cards for cheap to random people on the internet for crypto

holtalanm2• 6 years ago

Ever been to Costco? They sell $50 gift cards for a bunch of different stores, and you only pay like $45 at the register.

I know, $5 isn't much, but it is still lower than face value.

silverpepsi3• 6 years ago

One black friday season I went in Office Max or Depot and bought 20 $100 gift cards for Amazon because there was a very slight discount. This enabled me to purchase a laptop and save $100 approx

Remember Amazon has the credit card fee margin of savings if someone uses a gift card instead of a credit card.

Theodores• 6 years ago

I have a gift card in my wallet that you can have for a fraction of what it is for. I need nothing from the store issuing the gift card but I would like booze from the shop around the corner or cash for some contraband substances.

The store issuing the gift card is out of the town center and I have had it for ages. Make me an offer and, if I get enough booze or contraband for now/tonight then I am happy.

xur17• 6 years ago

A lot of time the merchants sell them at a discount since they are normally gifted, so it brings in new business, some are lost, etc. There are entire communities online that take advantage of these discounts + credit card points, and resell the cards to others.

thaumasiotes3• 6 years ago

and how could gift cards ever be cheaper than face value (surely someone somewhere would be working at a loss)?

Gift cards are always cheaper than face value. The basic economics tells you they can't be more expensive than that, since they are similar to money, but worse. They can easily be cheaper; $300 at Starbucks is not as good as $200 wherever you want.

Your incredulity is pretty shocking; if you want to see gift cards sold cheaper than face value, all you need to do is walk into a Costco.

parliament32• 6 years ago

Say you got a gift card as a gift (ya know, like the name implies) for some store you know you'll never shop at. Wouldn't you be okay with selling it for 90% of the value online, rather than let it sit and collect dust?

gruez8• 6 years ago

My only logic is that its a form of money laundering.

That doesn't really make sense. Why buy it online leaving a papertrail (ebay account, bank/credit card transactions), when you can buy it anonymously in person using cash? The daily volume also isn't there. It's a couple thousand dollars per day at most. You can easily get that amount in person without raising any suspicion by driving to different stores in your city.

jklein11• 6 years ago

Money laundering typically implies taking illegitimate sources of income and making them seem legitimate. In this case you could sell yourself $100 gift cards for $120. You wouldn’t even necessarily have to send yourself a gift card. You now have a legit source of income aka your eBay sellers account for illegal income.

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

And where do you get the cash? This scheme is part of how you convert illegitimate money (usually stolen CCs in the case of eCommerce) into cash.

You set up a bank account and amazon seller account you control in someone else's name. Then you use your stolen CCs to buy the "book" from yourself thereby converting credit card details into money in an account you control. From there you can get the money out in a multitude of ways (or launder it again through the same or another method) depending on your risk tolerance.

koboll• 6 years ago

More likely churning credit card points.

choeger2• 6 years ago

At 60% ? I would love to know the credit card that makes this a profitable enterprise.

grecy• 6 years ago

What if it's just a big game between friends for Credit Card Points?

We just keep going back and forward between you and I, always getting the $1k Credit Card sign up bonuses and a TON of points each month.

Sophistifunk• 6 years ago

I've spent a few thousand on itunes gift cards over a decade or so, all at above face value, because it's the only way to get funds into my "US" account, which is the only way to get access to a lot of content without torrenting it.

These days though, I just torrent more often than not. It's just too much work trying to pay for the content I like.

folli• 6 years ago

Using GPT-3 to 'write' the books instead of obvious gibberish would lead to an additional layer of evasion.

revicon• 6 years ago

Is there a version of GPT-3 that is available for use by the general public right now? I haven't seen anything outside of OpenAPI's private beta.

jrockway• 6 years ago

GPT-2 is available. I played with it a little bit and was mildly impressed. I don't think I would read a book written by GPT-2, but it's better than gibberish.

zaroth• 6 years ago

Needs (2018)

Sujan• 6 years ago

(2018)

choeger2• 6 years ago

Not so much laundering the money, but rather obscuring the trail between the crime and the money. Laundering would come afterwards, I presume.

Ok, so to pull this of, you need to:

1. have one or more stolen credit cards (obviously not on your name)

2. sell a book under a false name and buy it with the stolen credit card

3. have a bank account somewhere either under the false name from 2. or under some other false name or with a bank that will never give out your real name

So the money is not "clean" because it now rests inside a bank account with a false name or a bank that does not cooperate with authorities. In any case it is still somewhat shady.

gruez8• 6 years ago

1. have one or more stolen credit cards (obviously not on your name)
2. sell a book under a false name and buy it with the stolen credit card

That probably won't work too well because you'll have a unusually high chargeback rate on your account which would lead to your account getting flagged. You also eat the charge of chargebacks so that will eat into your profits. This could work as a part of a larger money laundering scheme though. eg. you have cash from selling drugs and you want to clean them, so you buy amazon gift cards with it and then use them to buy your ebook. now you have a clean source of income (selling ebooks) that the IRS would be satisfied with.

mywittyname6• 6 years ago

How can the IRS be satisfied when someone else's identity is being used? It doesn't make sense because the launderer is still in possession of dirty, now stolen, money.

I'm guessing they are using the identify of "real" authors to bypass some kind of check Amazon has on new accounts selling books from unknown authors. Otherwise, what you're saying makes sense.

csomar• 6 years ago

I don't think IRS is your issue. (after all, the IRS taxes criminal income). His issue is access to the banking infrastructure, which can be difficult if he has lots of cash, or money sitting offshore. He might not even care about the IRS or the US, but just needs a "pass-through" to another entity.

cortesoft• 6 years ago

Except the IRS thinks the impersonated author is making that income, not the person trying to launder money. This won't help them with the IRS.

arafa• 6 years ago

I agree, the title is misleading. This doesn't have the traditional hallmarks of money laundering since the scheme is mostly transparent and fradulent. It's really just a scam.

lmeyerov2• 6 years ago

Sort of, especially if you can do a network of these.

Amazon is an Everything store, including more easily washed financial products like gift cards that companies normally avoid for these reasons. I bet they can use their proceeds to exchange for these.

I am curious if, by having a linked AWS account fueled by these, if there is a way to fully wash. E.g., bitcoin mining sets a super lossy floor.

(We do graph analytics, where mining webs of transactions & their meta data is super interesting. Funny behaviors like these pop out as weird and extreme looking topologies when looking at them :)

leetcrew• 6 years ago

how do you wash a gift card? I would assume the original method of payment for the card is logged somewhere. unless you can turn around and sell the gift card for cash really quick, you would be stuck holding evidence.

mhb• 6 years ago

How is this money "laundering"? It just seems like a way to use stolen credit cards to make fraudulent charges.

quercusa2• 6 years ago

This feels like some sort of scam but it's not clear what the purpose would be:

G.J. Blokdijk is the 'author' of thousands of medical titles: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&fie...

Gerardus Blokdijk gets more than 40,000 hits for computer-related titles apparently generated by template: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Gerardus+Blokdyk&i=stripbooks&ref...

duskwuff• 6 years ago

Different kind of scam. Those books are fillable forms -- the medical titles have pages of generic questions like "how often should I take <some medication>" and "can you take <some medication> with food", with large spaces for the reader to write an answer. The books aren't specific to the medication at all, as evidenced by the fact that they're full of irrelevant questions (like asking if an antiparasitic drug is addictive).

The business titles in the second SERP look similar -- they're poorly formatted scoring systems or checklists.

So yeah. Those books look "legitimate" inasmuch as they are at least intended to be bought by real people believing that they are useful, rather than as a means of money laundering. The content of the books is heavily templated to the point of making the books not worth their selling price, but that's a separate issue.

3np• 6 years ago

I stumpled upon Blokdijk last week when looking for resources on setting up Cyrus IMAP. I don't think this is a simple money laundering scam after looking further into it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyrus-IMAP-Server-Complete-Guide-eb...

I found the full text elsewhere and it's basically 215+ pages of boilerplate/generated questions with blank answers to fill in. Complete nonsense. It's not only sold on Amazon, but on several other otherwise-not-that-dodgy sites as well.

The author even has an Australia-based business selling "licenses", "certifications", "professional development" etc. Blokdijk/Blokdyk (he spells his name inconsistently) looks like a typical conman with a small number of Schroedinger accomplices and blindsided useful idiots.

https://theartofservice.com/

I get the vibe that if you sign up with them, you end up as a "consultant"/"affiliate"/"coach" spending your time acquiring new nodes in the network... Maybe there's a scammy MLM-component, maybe not, it's not spelled out, but I've seen that before even when it's not obvious from anything public.

I'd be surprised if their business would hold up to legal scrutiny.

And given that, who are these purchasers of his books on Amazon, then? I can't imagine anyone genuinely buying this and not asking for a refund. Is it just him buying from himself to boost his image, or are they that good at selling snake-oil?

------------

Then take a look at this, one of the top results I got when searching (warning, scam and probably contains malware): https://iv.0li.ru/books_db/?q=OFdIalBBN1dvcU1DbThiNTJIOVp0YS...

This is the most clever piracy-scam site I've seen. Note how the title is generated from the query and post dates are dynamically set so the earliest is old while the most recent is yesterday.

It's quite poetic how these assisted auto-content generating scams are chaining on to each other (:

skylanh• 6 years ago

I think I have the answer, and it's a lot less interesting than it appears at face value.

These titles are created by an IT company that is selling software / services. The software appears to do platform price matching / analytics, and one of those is on Amazon.

My understanding / assumption is that it appears that if they are a high frequency sellerid paired to their developerid, then they can increase their requests per second (http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_...) either by requesting a change, or maybe via background quotas set by Amazon.

The IT company has some promotional stuff, and they indicate a number of VM's using multiple public IPs to avoid throttling, and in addition:

[as a top seller we get 8 rp/s, instead of the newbie 0.5 rp/s against 20 items per request]

I went through some of the sellers, and noted some have some complete shite ratings, but that their ratings are consistently at a certain value even over 30/90/12 months. Lifetime values are highly skewed as it appears they pre-stuffed the hat. So for every real person that gets screwed by a cancelled order, they create a number of fake reviews.

So my conclusion based on what I see is that this is their place-holder author, each of the clients they've sold this to has a store front stocked with these titles, the clients generate a ton of fake sales at a reduced price, request a quota increase as "we're a large seller", and then happily do whatever system gaming they actually intended to do.

I could go further down this rabbit hole, but this hypothesis has been exhausted. I wish I was this interested in my actual job.

quercusa2• 6 years ago

Pretty interesting anyway; thanks!

ja27• 6 years ago

I've seen the same claim about obscure mobile apps.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

instead of using stolen credit cards wouldn't you instead have people bring their cash to get Amazon credit at a store, pay them 10 dollars per 450 dollars, they buy 'your' book with amazon credit, you've laundered 450 dollars for 10 dollars and some small expenses related to fake book generation etc.

robalfonso• 6 years ago

Yes, exactly this. In addition you don't really need other people. If you have actual cash, buy gift cards in cash yourself then purchase online. If you can publish one book thats giberish, then you can publish dozens. And it's trivial to have a dozen amazon accounts/email combos to make the purchases with.

lrossi2• 6 years ago

Given that some of the titles have 1-star reviews, I think the goal is to scam people into buying expensive crap. The books are auto generated and the content is worthless.

In many countries it’s difficult to request refunds for online payments, especially if it was clear what you were buying. There’s a look inside button you can use to see a large selection of pages.

He generated so many books probably to cover all kinds of tech topics, to reach more victims.

lrossi2• 6 years ago

What I mean to say is that a launderer would not have bothered leaving bad reviews for his own fake books. The people who did this bought the books by mistake.

Not sure why this idea gets downvoted. The simpler explanation is usually right.

kuroguro3• 6 years ago

Just fraud, not laundering. They're solving the problem of how to effectively cash out credit cards. Selling items in someone else's platform has multiple upsides:

1. it's a large trusted platform, so the victim's bank is less likely to freeze the transactions

2. multiple items with arbitrary pricing means maxing out each card is simpler

3. the platform will likely have to eat the charge-backs, so where ever the seller receives money from Amazon is relatively safe for a while to further convert into crypto or whatever

4. because of the size of the platform you can keep creating new accounts indefinitely - they cannot possibly vet all new sellers - this is probably where the stolen identities for authors come in. Amazon must be doing some basic sanity checks / credit score lookups or something similar - hence they need real peoples names / SSNs.

I've seen similar things on app stores / freelancer sites etc. Yes, the accounts get flagged after a while, but there's usually enough time to cash out and creating a new one isn't that hard.

elliekelly3• 6 years ago

How is this not money laundering? It is most definitely money laundering. The stolen money arrives in a bank account appearing “clean” because it was “earned” via Amazon book sales. The true origin of the illicit cash is now obscured and within the mainstream financial system.

kuroguro3• 6 years ago

That just seems short sighted as the seller's account would be tracked down sooner or later. Entering your real details on a receiving account is way too risky.

It would be possible to launder with a similar setup - just not with stolen cards but with prepaid cash/crypto ones so amazon doesn't flag the account for charge-backs. But then there's no real need to steal the book author's identity. You could just put your own name or a pseudonym on it. For a 1099 to arrive they've clearly entered the stolen SSN somewhere. You'd want your own SSN there to prove to the IRS that you've made the money... (and then you'd want to pay the taxes).

dralley• 6 years ago

Exactly. The same kind of money laundering happens on Steam as well. Buying and selling CS:GO skins and trading cards or whatever for hundreds or thousands of dollars through a trading platform not designed to care about shady transaction patterns.

S_A_P• 6 years ago

I know Patrick Reams- he is a semi well known ‘thought leader’/speaker in my industry. (Energy and Commodity markets) interesting to see what comes of this. What scares me is that somehow amazon knows where to send the 1099 but for whatever reason can’t let him access his account or otherwise verify his financial institution details? This doesn’t add up to me.

dkdk8283• 6 years ago

Comments in the article are from 2018: what’s changed since then?

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

So odd question if anyone can answer. Did Amazon already have the author's information ( and hence the 1099 ) or did the fraudster submit it ( in which case, why did he give the correct address )?

TheNorthman• 6 years ago

Reames is a credited author on Amazon by way of several commodity industry books

They most likely already had his information.

FireBeyond• 6 years ago

So I told them, ‘If you’re saying you can’t say whether I did receive the funds, tell me where they went?’ And they said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that.’ So I can’t clear myself and they won’t clear me.”

I had the same with Verizon after someone opened a wireless account in my name. After supplying all the documentation they asked for, they came back to me, "our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently" (i.e. that they were saying that the account, and credit tradeline, were in fact mine).

"So what documents did I use to open this account?" "We can't tell you, for privacy reasons." "Did you verify my identity at the start of this call?" "Yes." "And you're saying your investigation believes that I opened the account." "Yes." "So I can't see my own documents in order to protect my privacy?" "Well... in case the account isn't yours... umm, ahh..." "..." "..."

benlivengood• 6 years ago

I'm sure the real reason is avoiding liability for not making any real effort to verify the documents.

EE84M3i• 6 years ago

Alternatively, they could simply just not be making these records not available to whoever they were talking to at all and/or never disclose them as a matter of blanket policy.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

I had a similar issue with CVS. Resolved by escalating to state attorney general.

silexia• 6 years ago

Amazon has been extremely disappointing in it's lack of efforts to remove fraud like this book or the millions of fake reviews. I will no longer be buying from Amazon.

ryanmercer• 6 years ago

I had the same with Verizon after someone opened a wireless account in my name. After supplying all the documentation they asked for, they came back to me, "our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently"

Last summer I get a teams message from my manager "Call me ASAP" uhhh, crap, what did I do wrong.

HR had received an attempt to verify my unemployment claim. Uh, er, what? Apparently, like millions of other Americans this past summer, I was one of the people that someone tried to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits on.

I contacted the unemployment office her and reported it, a day or so later got a form email back stating this was happening like crazy and I needed to take no further action.

our investigation believes the account was not opened fraudulently" (i.e. that they were saying that the account, and credit tradeline, were in fact mine).

This is an ongoing fear of mine. That come tax time they're going to be like "whoa, you owe all these taxes on the thousands of unemployment income you were paid" and I'll be like "uhhhhhhhh, no?"

lr1970• 6 years ago

The linked article is from February 2018 -- almost 3 years ago. How relevant is it now in 2021?

DeBraid• 6 years ago

An investor, Meb Faber, has written on this topic several times (2018):

Why All My Books Are Now Free (aka A Lesson in Amazon Scams and Money Laundering)

https://mebfaber.com/2018/04/18/how-to-launder-money-with-am...

Money laundering via author impersonation on Amazon?

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