Comment by inquiryaccount
6 years ago
This reminds me of a post I submitted a few weeks ago on HN.
A friend of mine works for a restaurant group in NYC and they like many they have had to respond by offering delivery to folks in order to keep some revenue flowing. He and I were chatting and he mentioned that lately, a large majority of high value ($500+) orders were fraudulent with the fraudster ordering things that can be resold such as high-value wine, liquor, etc that isn't necessarily perishable. He says that the scams work like this:
1. The order comes in via Caviar usually with a ridiculous amount of booze. It is usually a courier delivery but he says looking back, some have been picked up by 'customers'.
2. There are some instances where the order gets canceled either by the scammer within the 2 min grace period post ordering of from the actual customer who had their account phished/received some sort of alert/and stopped the transaction.
I am intrigued by this because there is obviously someone on the receiving end that's ending up with a boatload of high-end booze and then offloading it somehow while Caviar eats the dispute later on and still pays the restaurant out.
Literally, thousands of dollars a week of fraudulent booze orders are being fulfilled to people fraudsters using phished accounts with valid cc's. The consumer eventually realizes the charge, disputes it, and gets their money back leaving Caviar with the bill.
Well, since DoorDash is listed as the copyright holder on the bottom of www trycaviar com it looks like DoorDash is just bleeding their $400mm series F out under a different name.
Maybe have them try the arbitrage themselves per the article and put the profit _and_ the booze directly in their pockets... (/s?)
DoorDash purchased Caviar from Square last August: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/doordash-is-buying-caviar-...
I assume DoorDash doesn't want to alienate loyal Caviar customers and so is continuing to operate it independently, similar to how Grubhub and Seamless merged seven years ago but still run two different websites (albeit with identical design).
I bet the person physically receiving the wine/goods is some gullible, naive person who has been social engineered into thinking they're working for a legit business.
It's like the 419 emails where they are trying to "recruit a remote working employee in our finance department" where your job is actually to receive fraudulent ACH wire transfers and send the money to some overseas destinations, go to a bitcoin ATM and buy bitcoin to send to the scammer, etc.
If the scammers are reasonably intelligent and have put a degree of thought into how to not get caught doing this, they'll introduce multiple layers of abstraction between the physical delivery of $450 bottles of liquor, and the point at which that booze is turned into (gift cards, bitcoin, ethereum, etc) and ultimately in their hands. They're probably calculating on taking at least a 20-35% haircut on the revenue before the somewhat-cleaned-up cryptocurrency or gift cards makes it to them.
From what I can gather, it is a ring of people behind this operation likely getting a commission for each 'drop' back at base
https://www.google.com/maps/place/101+bowery+st/@40.7176021,...
Appears likely that someone that has access to the hotel’s customer CC data might be behind this and the local police are aware of it too...
“Not only is this hotel horrible, our guests had their credit card stolen and $500 worth of purchases made on it!!! Reporting this place to the police. Do not even go near this hotel. Total crooks, denied everything when confronted but they were caught red handed” [1]
...makes you wonder what is really going on.
[1] https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Hotel_Review-g60763-d267183-Revie...
So money laundering
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Told the police about it? Someone would be eager to chase that case.
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Or, it is the age of social distancing. Just order it to a random address and steal it off the porch/lobby area.
Majority of the liquor ordered using a phished account goes here – so sketchy: https://www.google.com/maps/place/101+bowery+st/@40.7176021,...
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There are fences (shady stores) in shady locations that will buy booze, baby formula/diapers, and over the counter medicine like daily Anti-acids. If you order liquor or wines that people sing/rap about you can find a place to sell it.
The scammers just need to find a fence which is pretty easy if you know where to look. They’ll even tell you what is the best stuff to get.
Yeah, the scammers ordering their stuff are only getting the good stuff. Don Julio, 1942, Johnny Walker Blue, high-end wines, etc.
Last week I noticed that my credit card number had been stolen. But only for UberEats, I had tons of UberEats transaction of $30-$50. It's not my UberEats account that was stolen because I logged in in my account and I had not ordered anything. So looks like there's a market to get those stolen CC and use it to order a bunch of stuff from restaurants. Perhaps you're right, it's to order things that can be resold (wine, etc).
And because it's the pandemic, i'm sure lots of people wouldn't notice those extra charges to their credit card right away because they already order through those apps. I haven't used UberEats in a year so it was easy for me to notice.
Consumers often don't realize the charge, I believe, until it's too late. Tech-illiterate old folk getting hit by the latest leak of information from <take your pick of large company>.