> 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..."
"..."
"..."
>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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 (:
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.
>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.
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 :)
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.
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.
>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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 )?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] FireBeyond|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|5 years ago|reply
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?"
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quercusa|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] skylanh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duskwuff|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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 (:
[+] [-] choeger|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gruez|5 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] lmeyerov|5 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] arafa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] compsciphd|5 years ago|reply
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=amazon+gift+c...
My only logic is that its a form of money laundering.
[+] [-] Sophistifunk|5 years ago|reply
These days though, I just torrent more often than not. It's just too much work trying to pay for the content I like.
[+] [-] gruez|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grecy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] strogonoff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koboll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixtaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] folli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revicon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robalfonso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkdk8283|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheNorthman|5 years ago|reply
They most likely already had his information.
[+] [-] lrossi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lrossi|5 years ago|reply
Not sure why this idea gets downvoted. The simpler explanation is usually right.
[+] [-] DeBraid|5 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] ja27|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lr1970|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuroguro|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elliekelly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sujan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevespang|5 years ago|reply
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