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With Stolen Cards, Fraudsters Shop to Drop.
By Brian Krebs - KrebsOnSecurity.com
Friday, 9th October 2015
 

A time-honored method of extracting cash from stolen credit cards involves 'reshipping' scams, which manage the purchase, reshipment and resale of carded consumer goods from America to Eastern Europe â€" primarily Russia.

A new study suggests that some 1.6 million credit and debit cards are used to commit at least $1.8 billion in reshipping fraud each year, and identifies some choke points for disrupting this lucrative money laundering activity.

Many retailers long ago stopped allowing direct shipments of consumer goods from the United States to Russia and Eastern Europe, citing the high rate of fraudulent transactions for goods destined to those areas.

As a result, fraudsters have perfected the reshipping service, a criminal enterprise that allows card thieves and the service operators essentially split the profits from merchandise ordered with stolen credit and debit cards.

Source: Drops for Stuff research paper.

Much of the insight in this story comes from a study released last week called “Drops for Stuff: An Analysis of Reshipping Mule Scams,” which has multiple contributors (including this author). To better understand reshipping scheme, it helps to have a quick primer on the terminology thieves use to describe different actors in the scam.

The “operator” of the reshipping service specializes in recruiting “reshipping mules” or “drops” â€" essentially unwitting consumers in the United States who are enlisted through work-at-home job scams and promised up to $2,500 per month salary just for receiving and reshipping packages.

In practice, virtually all drops are cut loose after approximately 30 days of their first shipment â€" just before the promised paycheck is due. Because of this constant churn, the operator must be constantly recruiting new drops.

The operator sells access to his stable of drops to card thieves, also known as “stuffers.” The stuffers use stolen cards to purchase high-value products from merchants and have the merchants ship the items to the drops’ address. Once the drops receive the packages, the stuffers provide them with prepaid shipping labels that the mules will use to ship the packages to the stuffers themselves. After they receive the packaged relayed by the drops, the stuffers then sell the products on the local black market.

The shipping service operator will either take a percentage cut (up to 50 percent) where stuffers pay a portion of the product’s retail value to the site operator as the reshipping fee. On the other hand, those operations that target lower-priced products (clothing, e.g.) may simply charge a flat-rate fee of $50 to $70 per package. Depending on the sophistication of the reshipping service, stuffers can either buy shipping labels directly from the service â€" generally at a volume discount â€" or provide their own [for a discussion of ancillary criminal services that resell stolen USPS labels purchased wholesale, check out this story from 2014].

The researchers found that reshipping sites typically guarantee a certain level of customer satisfaction for successful package delivery, with some important caveats. If a drop who is not marked as problematic embezzles the package, reshipping sites offer free shipping for the next package or pay up to 15% of the item’s value as compensation to stuffers (e.g., as compensation for “burning” the credit card or the already-paid reshipping label).

However, in cases where the authorities identify the drop and intercept the package, the reshipping sites provide no compensation â€" it calls these incidents “acts of God” over which it has no control.

“For a premium, stuffers can rent private drops that no other stuffers will have access to,” the researchers wrote. “Such private drops are presumably more reliable and are shielded from interference by other stuffers and, in turn, have a reduced risk to be discovered (hence, lower risk of losing packages).”

AMPLIFYING PROFITS

One of the key benefits of cashing out stolen cards using a reshipping service is that many luxury consumer goods that are typically bought with stolen cards â€" gaming consoles, iPads, iPhones and other Apple devices, for instance â€" can be sold in Russia for a 30 percent to 5o percent markup on top of the original purchase price, allowing the thieves to increase their return on each stolen card.

For example, an Apple MacBook selling for 1,000 US dollars in the United States typically retails for for about 1,400 US dollars in Russia because a variety of customs duties, taxes and other fees increase their price.

It’s not hard to see how this can become a very lucrative form of fraud for everyone involved (except the drops). According to the researchers, the average damage from a reshipping scheme per cardholder is $1, 156.93. In this case, the stuffer buys a card off the black market for $10, turns around and purchases more than $1,100 worth of goods. After the reshipping service takes its cut (~$550), and the stuffer pays for his reshipping label (~$100), the stuffer receives the stolen goods and sells them on the black market in Russia for $1,400. He has just turned a $10 investment into more than $700. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

The study examined the inner workings of seven different reshipping services over a period of five years, from 2010 to 2015, and involved data shared by the FBI and the U.S. Postal Investigative Service. The analysis showed that at least 85 percent of packages being reshipped via these schemes were being sent to Moscow or to the immediate surrounding areas of Moscow.

The researchers wrote that “although it is often impossible to apprehend criminals who are abroad, the patterns of reshipping destinations can help to intercept the international shipping packages beforethey leave the country, e.g., at an USPS International Service Center. Focusing inspection efforts on the packages destined to the stuffers’ prime destination cities can increase the success of intercepting items from reshipping scams.”

The research team wrote that disrupting the reshipping chains of these scams has the potential to cripple the underground economy by affecting a major income stream of cybercriminals. By way of example, the team found that a single criminal-operated reshipping service  can earn a yearly revenue of over 7.3 million US dollars, most of which is profit.

A copy of the full paper is available here (PDF).

Brian Krebs worked as a reporter for The Washington Post from 1995 to 2009, authoring more than 1,300 blog posts for the Security Fix blog, as well as hundreds of stories for washingtonpost.com and The Washington Post newspaper, including eight front-page stories in the dead-tree edition and a Post Magazine cover piece on botnet operators. He was recently profiled in Business Week and by Poynter.org.

www.krebsonsecurity.com

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