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Online Fraud: Drop Shipped LEGO, etc. (eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Bricklink, etc.)
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@Legouk - In addition to the advice already, to cover yourself against any repercussions, you might also mention it to your local police station. Take along any information/emails etc. you have relating the sales transactions.
Got to ask though....and I don't expect you to post it here, but I wouldn't mind knowing out of curiosity how much you took and over what period if you can PM me.
There were a bunch of suspiscious listings on ebay in the UK this morning. The seller even admitted he was selling on behalf of someone else, but seemed not to appreciate it could be a scam. The clever bit about the scammer approaching someone who has already bought a set off them is that the buyer has seen a pristine item arrive and thus is more likely to believe them.
You also can't take the money aspect out of it. If someone starts earning £200-300 in commission each day they sell stuff, it becomes more convenient for them to turn a blind eye and continue to believe it's legitimate.
All the sets sell, they collect their PayPal money, give you a legit tracking number but never send it. Whammo...you wait three weeks and receive nothing. EBAY makes you wait to file a claim, thus giving the crook even more time to scam someone else.
It has happened to me twice on EBAY, once with the Millennium Falcon and the second time was the Taj Mahal. EBAY did refund me my money though with little questions asked. Their customer service/complaint department is usually slow, but it works. Try to avoid the new seller with high priced Lego sets.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LEGO-Creator-Grand-Emporium-BRAND-NEW-/170758054544?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27c1f92290
I'm not sure it's fair to call them "morons", but possibly naive in some instances. Plenty of people live in countries where the likes of [email protected] or Amazon for example don't ship or it's cheaper to buy at a higher rate in one country and have it shipped to them overseas.
Perhaps a person was given $550 in eBay giftcards, and don't have the $400 cash to spend with Lego. A bit far-fetched I suppose, but it could happen.
I’ve been forwarding on information on all the sellers I’ve been receiving emails about for literally the last two days, so it’s been great.
I send all the information we get to the eBay fraud team that helps with shutting down the stores and attempting to pursue criminal charges.
I’ll do my best to get onto brick set today to check the posts.
If people simply send me information when they either are victims (receive eBay purchases shipped from Lego) or see possible fraudulent sellers anyone can email me (with screen shots if possible) and I’ll record all the information and deal with eBay.
Again I truly appreciate your help and have been truly inspired by the Lego fans enthusiasm to protect our product.
Cheers,
Thor
Thor Magnussen
Assistant Controller
CED Finance US
Direct
+1 860 763 6932
Mobile
+1 860 944 9759
E-mail
[email protected]
It looks like he was out of the office over the holidays and is really getting to grips with it this week. Here's hoping eBay does something.
My apologies for not being more active on here since my first post. I've been playing catch up as we can all see that there's plenty to do as far as shutting down some of these sellers.
As far as the improvements on the site, I've taken down some of your recommendations (Verified by Visa) etc and have brought that to the appropriate employees here.
My main concern at the moment is reducing the rampant fraud that we're seeing via the drop ship scam.
If you continue to see sellers on ebay with sketchy sales/inventory feel free to email me the seller name and screen shots if possible.
Also any information about the people recruiting these sellers (and it seems they've tried recruiting some of you as well) would be appreciated as well.
Thanks again everyone.
-Thor
[email protected]
Go get 'em !
So, why do they do it? Do they really get away with having made all of this fraudulent profit and can escape from the law? It's as if they don't fear the fallout of their actions one bit.
You have at least five separate parties to the crime: the master criminal who has acquired a large set of stolen credit card information, the secondary criminal who owns the eBay account and is either ignorant of the criminal nature of the activities or turns a blind eye. The primary victim, the person who owns the credit card. The secondary victim, LEGO, a merchant who's goods are being purchased fraudulently. And the third victim, the eBay buyer who gets stolen goods.
So first off you need to detect the crime. Route A) victim 1 sees the fraudulent charges on the credit card. Since it only happens once, perhaps it slips by the credit card holder. But if it doesn't, this goes to the credit card company. Then then follows up with victim 2. Which leads to victim 3. Which then may lead to criminal 2. Route B) victim 3 smells something fishy. Maybe. Most of the times either doesn't know or care. If something is fishy, then maybe it will go to eBay, which doesn't care. Maybe it will be returned, but that means it ends there because the matter is not identified as a scam by anyone important. Maybe it gets to LEGO, which then needs to follow up with victim 1 and the credit card companies. Then maybe the follow up lead to criminal two.
Route A or B take a lot of time and are not always followed through. So before anyone gets to criminal 2, lots of time goes by while the scam runs. Money can be drained from the criminal PayPal accounts in the meantime. If the eBay account is finally shutdown, you're only shutting down criminal 2. Criminal 1 moves on to other affiliates and keeps the scam going. To take down criminal 1 you need to arrest and charge with a crime. But, there are many road blocks to doing this.
First of all, it is hard to identify criminal 1. They are probably using false identities to set stuff up and are behind this terribly complex picture of all the parties involved. Second of all, even if you figure out who it is, you need to have the evidence that they are committing a crime. There isn't much of a link between victims 1 and 2, where the stolen credit card is used, and criminals 1 and 2. The link is victim 3, but you need to prove that victim 3 is not a criminal, and that is hard to do. Third of all, you have massive jurisdiction problems. Criminal 1 is typically in a different country than the victims. So who's going to prosecute and investigate across the different parties involved and their respective jurisdictions?
All of this complexity means that the criminal mastermind can run this operation for a long time with little risk of getting caught and lots of profit.
Ok, so identity theft does occur... Biometrics would solve a lot of that, but probably not all of it.
More or less, technology is the problem, technology can be the answer, but a lot would have to change.
Another option would be to simply call the card member on any charge that shipped somewhere other than the billing address. This is a minor thing, if I want to place a "gift order" and ship something somewhere else, a 30 second phone call is not a problem, and it saves everyone a lot of trouble.
Biometrics is overkill for Internet transactions. Digital signatures are more than enough for what you're thinking about. Look at it this way: You scan you finger or whatever on your computer, which the hardware converts to a unique set of information, which would then be sent over the Internet to the vendor or whatever. Why bother with the hardware and risk of false negatives? All that's needed is the unique set of information that you generate anyway, so why not use a digital signature instead?
A 30 second phone call doesn't save everyone a lot of trouble. It is its own set of trouble and saves some trouble in a particular set of circumstances.
Here's what I'd do:
-Report the items to eBay. They have tons of people that try and combat these guys.
-If you buy something that's clearly stolen, counterfeit, incorrect etc. the buyer protection policy should have you covered. Its lengthy, but does cover you in most cases. I've had to use it once.
-Someone trying to sell you something off eBay from an eBay listing is usually in violation of eBay's terms of service. You can report them as well via customer support usually via email unless they gave you a contact number.
If Lego is offering their support in working with eBay, you might as well contact them too. Although, make sure you still contact eBay since the problem is between you and the seller rather than you and Lego.
Personally, I setup my credit card to get charged via Paypal rather than funds directly in my Paypal account. My credit card will insure online purchases, to some extent, so if eBay/Paypal couldn't get me my money back I could do a charge back.
Biometrics is pretty interesting and, I think, once the barriers to entry come down it could be used for auth on online accounts. Paypal and Facebook are also both pretty interesting sources of truth for user identity since the accounts tend to contain very personal information that's not easy to duplicate. You'd still have to deal with account takeovers though.
@LegoCzar Biometrics are overrated. They're OK for applications that need you to be there, like opening the door. If you need your device to send the biometric info through the Internet, why bother? Just use digital signatures.
Use them in person when opening a bank account, so that you can only open one.
If you open a PayPal account, there would need to be a place to go in person to be scanned, so that you could not open ten different PayPal accounts.
The one that use stolen credit card, they don't use their true identity anymore. These people will solicit on website such as freelance.com for Internet marketing project where they will hire someone with good ebay account and good feedback rating. They will offer 15% income on top of all fee by ebay and paypal. Many people who are out of jobs will fall for these easy money Internet marketing job and list items for the scammer with their own good ebay account.
The second type of people who don't care to pay back the credit card are usually foreign student or people who are planning to move out of the USA forever. Thanks to our generous banking system, many of the people has credit card with large limit. Quick way to cash out is to sell hot item like lego.
In conclusion, Lego.com has to work harder to protect themselves from the scam. There are no easy way to do it but to work with the banks. In the meantime, we lego collector will occasionally gets lego on the cheap from these people.