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Comment by miltava

3 days ago

Im not op and I’m not sure they are using it for money laundering.

A money launderer can use a marketplace by creating a seller account and buying from himself. Since he’s the one buying he doesn’t need to deliver anything but he gets the money from a legit source. Usually he would use a payment method as close to money as possible so that it leaves less traces. But in OPs case, the amounts are low so he needs too many transactions to get something valuable. And because of the disputes, he’s (probably) not getting the money (?).

It could be card testing: the fraudster has a bunch of cards and doesn’t know which is valid or canceled. The best way to find out is to test in a real site. So he’ll test out each of them and the ones that go through are good to use elsewhere. The thing is that it would be better for him not to dispute the transactions so the OP would take much longer to find out about the scheme and shut it down. It’s better to use low amount transactions in this case so it doesn’t use too much of the credit available for him to defraud and probably doesn’t warn the card owner.

Another option is doing it just to hurt the OP marketplace. If you have too many disputes the brands can fine you and if you don’t solve the problem they can turn your account off. I’ve seen it happen when a competitor was trying to hurt the e-commerce. It’s a low move and rare but it happens.

One thing that might help is to analyze the sellers too. In a money laundering and even in the other settings, it could be part of the scheme. Are they new accounts? Are their volume exploding out of nowhere? Etc

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miltava

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addandsubtract  3 days ago

> Since he’s the one buying he doesn’t need to deliver anything

This only works (in my mental model), when you produce the product you're selling in-house – like a digital product. But lots of "reselling" type businesses try to use this scheme as well. Like a restaurant might ring up more meals than they served, or less to not pay taxes. But, is this not easily spotted when the food import(?) cost doesn't match the revenue?

Maybe I just answered my own question, if the business is able to cook the books both ways, but it would also limit how much they're able to launder. Or is the import/export balance rarely/never checked?

  • gruez  3 days ago

    That's why popular businesses for money laundering are car washes and nail salons. They're mostly cash based, and have very little in the way of inventory, so it's easy inflate your sales.

    • Sohcahtoa82  3 days ago

      I'd think a video game arcade, especially one with laser tag, would be the best option.

      Especially if you stick with quarters instead of using game cards like most modern arcades. Since quarters would be recycled anyways (Taken from the games and restocked into the quarter machine), it makes it easy to just deposit the cash you want to launder as if it had been fed into the quarter machine.

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