Comment by walrus01

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.